david@monymsys.uucp (David Kozinn) (11/13/89)
I've recently started receiving a feed of a small subset of all the available
news topics. My upstream feed has been very helpful in getting me set up and
helping me weed out the groups that I have no interest in. Most of this has
taken place by me sending him an updated sys file every few days as I go
through the process of eliminating groups from major categories. I realize
that many (most?) sites probably just take these large categories and leave it
up to their users as to what they want to keep and what they want to reject,
but as this is (currently) a small machine with limited capacity, and given
that I'm calling long distance for my news, I'm trying to minimize the amount
of data transferred.
So much for the intro, now to the meat: It would seem that I'm not the only
person in the world who has ever had to do this, and for feeds that don't have
an administrator as patient as mine (thanks Pete!) it would seem to make sense
to figure out some automated way to do this. I've read the manuals, looked at
RFC 1036 to see if there is a control message, and asked a few folks, and from
what I've been able to determine, there doesn't seem to be an automated way to
tell your upstream feed that you'd like to have the list of groups modified
that are sent to you.
The question is: Is there some way to do this automatically? If not, would
this be a useful feature to have? I'm not sure exactly how it would be
implemented (perhaps a regular mail message to news@yourfeed with some special
contents), but do others think that this would be a useful thing to have?
--
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Teaneck, NJ 07666-6888 | Telephone: +1-201-907-6990davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) (11/15/89)
In article <1989Nov13.145624.15454@monymsys.uucp>, david@monymsys.uucp (David Kozinn) writes: | I've recently started receiving a feed of a small subset of all the available | news topics. My upstream feed has been very helpful in getting me set up and | helping me weed out the groups that I have no interest in. Most of this has | taken place by me sending him an updated sys file every few days as I go | through the process of eliminating groups from major categories. [ more on this problem ] Have you looked at running IHAVE protocol? Although it's intended for people who have multiple feeds, it works well in this case. He sends you an IHAVE for a lot of groups, you select what you want using your sys file and do SENDME for the stuff you want. This lets you add and delete groups pretty freely. You will get some extra message traffic, but when you get your list settled down you can update the feed. Or if you may want to expand and don't want to do a lot of changes at their end, you may want to leave them feeding you a lot of stuff, and just not ask for it. Hint: I did this myself for awhile. -- bill davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen) "The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called 'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see that the world is flat!" - anon
coolidge@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge) (11/15/89)
david@monymsys.uucp (David Kozinn) writes: >So much for the intro, now to the meat: It would seem that I'm not the only >person in the world who has ever had to do this, and for feeds that don't have >an administrator as patient as mine (thanks Pete!) it would seem to make sense >to figure out some automated way to do this. I've read the manuals, looked at >RFC 1036 to see if there is a control message, and asked a few folks, and from >what I've been able to determine, there doesn't seem to be an automated way to >tell your upstream feed that you'd like to have the list of groups modified >that are sent to you. TMNN news has a feature that does this, I think. If it proves to be useful (and it seems to me that it would) then I would tend to guess that people will retrofit it into the other major news packages. For now, most people just have to suffer with sending mail to their feeds asking for subscription lists to be changed. We have just about the opposite problem: we take all newsgroups that people will send us, and whenever someone adds a new distribution we need it added to our sys entry. Furthermore, we add a new distribution every few weeks, and there's no good protocol for informing our connections that we now have more to offer. I'm considering doing a census of my connections every couple months informing them of what we currently carry and what their current sys line is and checking to see if they want any of the other distributions. --John -------------------------------------------------------------------------- John L. Coolidge Internet:coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu UUCP:uiucdcs!coolidge Of course I don't speak for the U of I (or anyone else except myself) Copyright 1989 John L. Coolidge. Copying allowed if (and only if) attributed. You may redistribute this article if and only if your recipients may as well. New NNTP connections always available! Send mail if you're interested.
billd@fps.com (Bill Davids_on) (11/15/89)
In article <1608@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes: > Have you looked at running IHAVE protocol? Although it's intended for >people who have multiple feeds, it works well in this case. He sends you >an IHAVE for a lot of groups, you select what you want using your sys >file and do SENDME for the stuff you want. This doesn't make sense. When Bnews sends an IHAVE message, it sends a list of message id's. The receiving system can't possibly know what groups the articles are in. Rick Adam's latest "IF" change (in patch 18) could almost work for this except that it's not set up for IHAVE batches but rather for regular batches meant to be used by a hacked nntpxmit/nntpd. You could use it for IHAVE by putting this in your sys file (on the sending system): foobar:distributions:IF:/usr/spool/batch/foobar.ihave Even then, the receiving system would have to determine the group from the path name which varies from system to system (making this a bit more complex). Even if you did that, you wouldn't know all the groups to which the article may have been crossposted. To do this with IHAVE/SENDME, you would need a new modifier for the sys file that would tell inews to put group name information in the IHAVE file. I think I like the idea of a control message to change the sys file better but I also think that the admin should be able to allow or disallow it on a per-site/per-hierarchy basis (with a default of nobody allowed). This would avoid the problem of run-away control messages that we are all so familiar with and help keep potentially obnoxious downstream sites from taking more than you want to send. As with other admin control messages, mail should be sent to the news admin whenever one of these control messages go through (mail should probably also be sent back to the requester). --Bill Davids_on
tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) (11/15/89)
In <1989Nov13.145624.15454@monymsys.uucp> david@monymsys.uucp (David Kozinn):
DK> The question is: Is there some way to do this automatically? If
DK> not, would this be a useful feature to have? I'm not sure exactly
DK> how it would be implemented (perhaps a regular mail message to
DK> news@yourfeed with some special contents), but do others think
DK> that this would be a useful thing to have?
In principle, I don't like this idea too much. I see some people
want to use IHAVE/SENDME type messages to do it, too. Some of my
concerns:
o The conspiracy could muck with your machine pretty easily and
verification and authorization would be nearly impossible (same
old song, follow-ups to alt.slack).
o The "human" factor. I _like_ having relations with other admins
and talking to them through mail. It would be a shame if the
de facto interaction with your USENET neighbours was to involve
even less direct contact between admins.
These are of course seemingly minor things to people that want
automation for everything; it's more how I _feel_ about it all.
You want a regular mail message to usenet@feed with special comments?
"Hey Dave, could you stop sending us alt.oxymorons? Thanks. (By the
way, I see Clarkson toasted RPI's butt on the ice this past weekend.)
-- Russ" Okay, so it's a hypothetical message and Russ doesn't talk
to me all that much anyway. :-) I still like to have the interaction.
These concerns are probably meaningless anyway. If I didn't want
remote editing of my sys file, I could disable it. I am wary of
standards determined by default behaviour though.
Dave
--
(setq mail '("tale@pawl.rpi.edu" "tale@ai.mit.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))