fff@mplex.UUCP (Fred Fierling) (07/12/89)
I would like to post an article for distribution in West Germany only, but our /usr/lib/news/distributions file only has codes for local, na, usa, world, etc. There must be more distribution codes than this. Where do I find them? -- Fred Fierling Tel: 604 875-1461 Microplex Systems Ltd, 265 East 1st Avenue uunet!mplex!fff Fax: 604 875-9029 Vancouver, BC, V5T 1A7, Canada
soley@moegate.UUCP (Norman S. Soley) (07/13/89)
In article <316@mplex.UUCP> fff@mplex.UUCP (Fred Fierling) writes: >I would like to post an article for distribution in West Germany only, but >our /usr/lib/news/distributions file only has codes for local, na, usa, world, >etc. > >There must be more distribution codes than this. Where do I find them? I doubt that there is an master list anywhere. Also there is no easy way to post to a distribution you are not part of, this is one of the reasons why many of the usenet sites in Toronto get the usa distribution. -- Norman Soley - The Communications Guy - Ontario Ministry of the Environment soley@moegate.UUCP or if you roll your own: uunet!attcan!ncrcan!moegate!soley The Minister speaks for the Ministry, I speak for myself. Got that! Good. Head for the hills - The shriners are coming, the shriners are coming
jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) (07/13/89)
In article <316@mplex.UUCP> fff@mplex.UUCP (Fred Fierling) writes: >I would like to post an article for distribution in West Germany only, but >our /usr/lib/news/distributions file only has codes for local, na, usa, world, >etc. (Fred is in Canada; I don't know why he has a usa distribution available. I suspect you aren't configured right, Fred) You cannot post to a distribution that your site is not a member of. How would your article reach West Germany if you specified that no sites other than West German sites should receive it and you don't have a direct link to a German site? The only way is to mail your article to someone in West Germany and ask him or her to post the article for you with a German distribution. -- -- Joe Buck jbuck@epimass.epi.com, uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck
bob@tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) (07/14/89)
In article <316@mplex.UUCP> fff@mplex.UUCP (Fred Fierling) writes: I would like to post an article for distribution in West Germany only, but our /usr/lib/news/distributions file only has codes for local, na, usa, world, etc. There must be more distribution codes than this. Where do I find them? -- Fred Fierling Tel: 604 875-1461 Microplex Systems Ltd, 265 East 1st Ave uunet!mplex!fff Fax: 604 875-9029 Vancouver, BC, V5T 1A7, Canada In article <464@moegate.UUCP> soley@moegate.UUCP (Norman S. Soley) writes I doubt that there is an master list anywhere. That's right - distributions are just things that two consenting sites put into their corresponding sys file lines. Also there is no easy way to post to a distribution you are not part of, this is one of the reasons why many of the usenet sites in Toronto get the usa distribution. In article <3387@epimass.EPI.COM> jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes: You cannot post to a distribution that your site is not a member of. How would your article reach West Germany if you specified that no sites other than West German sites should receive it and you don't have a direct link to a German site? The only way is to mail your article to someone in West Germany and ask him or her to post the article for you with a German distribution. This sort of issue has been examined before, though in a different context. Still, very similar problems and solutions arose. Suppose we consider a news distribution to be similar to a hardware network that supports broadcasts. Then machines not "attached" to that distribution have problems receiving, and sending, "broadcasts" on that network. RFC 947 discusses multi-network broadcasting within an internet context, developed as a mechanism to support the Chronus operating system. It uses a forwarder/repeater mechanism, and discusses the problem of using link-level repeaters - the equivalent of machines along the way passing a distribution. RFC 947 refers the reader to RFCs 919 (UDP broadcasting) and 940 (IP subnetting) as well. 919 notes: ...This case is the same as local-network broadcasts; the datagram is routed by normal mechanisms until it reaches a gateway attached to the destination IP network, at which point it is broadcast. This class of broadcasting is also known as "directed broadcasting", or quaintly as sending a "letter bomb". ... Most of the complexity in supporting broadcasts lies in gateways. If a gateway receives a directed broadcast for a network to which it is not connected, it simply forwards it using the usual mechanism. Otherwise, it must do some additional work. The "letter bomb" analogy seems particularly apropos in the Usenet environment :-) How might one build a news repeater? Suppose sites A and B maintain a news link, and sites B and C do likewise. Suppose their sys files look like: A: A:dist1,dist3:: B:dist1,dist3:F: B: A:dist1,dist3:F: B:dist1,dist2:: C:dist2,dist3:F: C: B:dist2,dist3:F: C:dist2,dist3:: dist3 would pass through B without appearing in their local spool for the local readership - effectively, a news repeater. The A-B and B-C links would still carry the dist3 traffic, and B would need to be a willing party to the arrangement. But B wouldn't be a part of the dist3 "hardware network". Of course, this can't be done in the news world for both social and technical reasons. Socially: it wouldn't be polite to pass traffic through an intermediary that wasn't receiving the benefit of that traffic for its own users (though if they were willing and either friendly or well paid, they could make the service available). Also, being able to scream somewhere else (a ventriloquist posting?) would be quite impolite, because it would be stirring things up without waiting around for the repercussions. Technically: before an article can be gathered up to be sent along to other neighbors in the same distribution, it must exist in the news spool area of the machine doing the collecting. This is a lot more participation in the transmission process than is required of a typical IP router or Ethernet repeater, though those packet forwarders must have the packet in memory while shuffling it onto the other interface. All this is why sites that wish to exchange a distribution must have a direct connection - like setting up a link from your site in Canada to some site (any site!) in Germany that's on the de distribution. Perhaps distributions can be considered as protocol families, which can only be understood and forwarded by routers that are knowledgeable about that protocol - e.g. a DECnet packet will see a TCP or XNS router as a firebreak between it and other DECnet networks. Oh well, those are just some of my musings about analogies that can perhaps be stretched too far :-)
clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis) (07/18/89)
In article <BOB.89Jul14101433@tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu> Bob Sutterfield <bob@cis.ohio-state.edu> writes: >In article <316@mplex.UUCP> fff@mplex.UUCP (Fred Fierling) writes: > I would like to post an article for distribution in West Germany > only, but our /usr/lib/news/distributions file only has codes for > local, na, usa, world, etc. >That's right - distributions are just things that two consenting sites >put into their corresponding sys file lines. > The only way is to mail your article to someone in West Germany and > ask him or her to post the article for you with a German > distribution. Bob goes on to suggest ways of changing sys files on machines to allow newsgroups to pass thru without appearing in the intermediate system's news directories, and suggest of reasons why they cannot be done. There is a very simple way - build a mail alias on the destination distribution that will receive incoming *mail* items and automatically insert them into the *news* network at that point. B news has a utility called "recnews" (or is it recmail? Never mind) that will do this. I imagine that several of the ARPA news lists are gatewayed into USENET this way. It doesn't require the co-operation (other than mail services and loading) of any intermediate sites. The difficulties being, of course, that there is no "standard" for this, and there aren't many (if any) of these set up - (eg: what alias on what machine corresponds to the "germany" distribution?). And besides, the target network may not appreciate getting additional stuff in their network... And chances are there's no way to get followup's back. For example, some years ago, someone in Australia was receiving a copy of "rec.chess" by a sys entry on one of the machines I managed news on that forwarded articles by mail to him. For a test, I changed the mail destination to point at a recnews alias he set up, so that not only did rec.chess articles go to him and go into his news system, he rebroadcast it out into the Australian network. We tested it for one day (maybe two articles) and we got flamed (gently I may add) for wasting money on other sites... Quite rightly as it turns out. So, we turned it off and he continued receiving it by mail. (though, of course he could have made it a local-only newsgroup) If you want to send something to another distribution, send it to someone on that distribution and have them post. Under-the-table automatic insertion of articles into other "domains" (particularly when structured like EUNET) is, ultimately, quite rude. -- Chris Lewis, R.H. Lathwell & Associates: Elegant Communications Inc. UUCP: {uunet!mnetor, utcsri!utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis Phone: (416)-595-5425
jim@tiamat.fsc.com (Jim O'Connor) (07/21/89)
In article <BOB.89Jul14101433@tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu>, bob@tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) writes: > Socially: it wouldn't be polite to pass traffic through an > intermediary that wasn't receiving the benefit of that traffic for > its own users (though if they were willing and either friendly or Sounds like mail to me :-). There's a lot of traffic that goes through this system (which I don't mind, we all do it, or the uucp mail system wouldn't work) which I don't benefit (much) from. Why wouldn't the same work for news? Perhaps I don't get any benefit out of passing the traffic, but perhaps the other two sites would return the favor by passing distributions that they won't keep, but that I will. ------------- James B. O'Connor jim@tiamat.fsc.com Filtration Sciences Corporation 615/821-4022 x. 651 *** Altos users unite! mail to "info-altos-request@tiamat.fsc.com" ***