jerry@oliveb.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre) (02/19/88)
I make fairly extensive use of the ihave/sendme protocol. With three incomming feeds it helps to cut down on some of the duplicate rejection. Even more important it provides an inexpensive way to provide reduncancy in the news flow. I send a 2 day old ihave to neighbors running version 2.11 news. That way if a batch gets dropped somewhere they will still get the articles. Examinging the requested articles can get quite interesting. In a couple of cases I was able to find errors in my "sys" file that were excluding certain combinations of groups and distributions. With that as background I found something interesting today. Sun (sun.com), in addition to the occasional article, requested a large number of articles with IDs in the format "<nnn@sun.soe.clarkson.edu>". Checking the actual articles showed that the path did already have a "!sun!user" in it. Of course the normal routing for news won't send articles to a site if their name is already in the path line. The result is that sun.com, and any of its leaf sites, would otherwise never have seen any articles that orriginated or passed exclusively through sun.soe.clarkson.edu. I have 94 articles in my history file with IDs containing "sun.soe.clarkson.edu". I guess the point of all this is that the ihave/senme can, if used properly, provide an inexpensive backup for propagation as well as transmission problems. Jerry Aguirre