wesommer@athena.mit.edu (Bill Sommerfeld) (10/24/89)
Sing to the tune of "I wish I were an Oscar Meyer Wiener":
Oh, I'm glad I'm not an ARPA-usenet gateway,
That is what I'd really hate to be-e-e.
'Cause if I were an ARPA-usenet gateway,
Everyone would be so pissed at me!
That little bit of doggerel has been in bloom-beacon's motd for the
past year or more. Today, I discovered why.
Does anyone out there have a set of (possibly local) newsgroups
starting with "na." or similar?
Why do I ask? Well, it's a long, convoluted story.
There is an internet mailing list, header-people@mc.lcs.mit.edu, which
is gatewayed with the usenet newsgroup comp.mail.headers. This takes
place at bloom-beacon, courtesy of software provided by Erik Fair.
Those of you who read the mailing list, and not the newsgroup, would
have recently seen a pair of messages advertising various goods for
sale (a used computer and a used Sno-Cone machine, but that's not
important right now).
Complaints were sent to usenet@athena.mit.edu about this. Rick Adams
was one of the complainers. Fortunately, he saved the misdirected
messages, which gave me a chance to track down the problem.
Investigation showed that these articles were originally posted to
"na.forsale" and "misc.forsale" (and a couple of others groups); an
examination of the "sys" file on Beacon showed that the news->mail
gateway entry automatically generated by Erik's software had a
distribution line containing "na", but not "!na.all" (since there
aren't any "na.*" newsgroups, right??).
I'm normally a careful type; I wanted to reproduce the bug, and verify
that the fix worked. So, I created a "na.forsale" newsgroup on a
system near bloom-beacon, posted a couple of test articles to it and
athena.test (the latter so that it would make it to beacon, which
doesn't have a "na.forsale" group) before and after the fix. Of
course, it took me two tries to get the thing fixed (I made the fix,
then tried to test it before I had installed it. We all make those
mistakes every so often..).
I sent out the fix, quenching the flames to usenet@athena.mit.edu. Or
so I thought.
My mailbox soon started filling up with people flaming me for posting
test messages to misc.forsale, plus the normal collection of automatic
acks for postings to *.test, for a posting that "should not" have made
it outside the local campus.
In a second attempt to quench the flames, I sent out cancel messages
for the test messages. Of course, an hour had already gone by, which
meant that, since bloom-beacon is on the NNTP backbone, the messages
were already long gone.. The flames continue to pour in.
So, I ask, who out there is mapping "na.forsale" into "misc.forsale"?
The morals of the story:
a) If somebody asks you to be a news to mail gateway site, refuse. It
may not be worth the hassle :-)
b) The C News feature which separates "distributions" and "newsgroup
hierarchies" into separate fields in the sys file is a step in the
right direction.
--
Henry Spencer is so much of a | Bill Sommerfeld at MIT/Project Athena
minimalist that I often forget | sommerfeld@mit.edu
he's there - anonymous |karl@cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) (10/24/89)
wesommer@athena.mit.edu writes:
So, I ask, who out there is mapping "na.forsale" into "misc.forsale"?
Probably an awful lot of people, Bill. Look at the sample
/usr/lib/news/aliases file provided in news/src/install.sh, at least
as of 2.11.18, probably much older than that.
I don't use it, but I'd bet that many, many people do.
--Karlwesommer@athena.mit.edu (Bill Sommerfeld) (10/24/89)
About an hour ago, I wrote: So, I ask, who out there is mapping "na.forsale" into "misc.forsale"? Karl Kleinpaste writes in reply: Probably an awful lot of people, Bill. Look at the sample /usr/lib/news/aliases file provided in news/src/install.sh, at least as of 2.11.18, probably much older than that. Aha! One more reason to use C News instead of B News :-) :-) :-) -- Henry Spencer is so much of a | Bill Sommerfeld at MIT/Project Athena minimalist that I often forget | sommerfeld@mit.edu he's there - anonymous |