[news.admin] control messages

ecl@mtgzy.UUCP (Evelyn C. Leeper) (08/14/87)

An interesting problem just surfaced.  I accidentally mis-posted something so I
did a cancel.  Being a diligent netter, I decided to check my upstream sites to
make sure the cancel was working.  What I discovered on one node was that it
was giving a partial feed to a third node, including the group I posted in, but
not including control.  Luckily, it was being batched, so I deleted the
erroneous message from the batch.

However, site admins should always pass control messages on, especially in
non-batched feeds, since otherwise there is a chance that a message will
propagate and the control message not.  Even in batched feeds, if the cancel
comes after the batch with the message has gone, it gets dropped.

So check those sys files.  Lines of the sort
	myleaf:comp,news,world::
should be changed to
	myleaf:comp,news,control,world::

(It would be nice if the cancel message could "travel" in the same group(s) as
the original, but youo can't have everything.)

					Evelyn C. Leeper
					(201) 957-2070
				UUCP:	ihnp4!mtgzy!ecl
				ARPA:	mtgzy!ecl@rutgers.rutgers.edu

rick@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams) (08/14/87)

a cancel message should have been posted in foo.bar.ctl if the
original message was in foo.bar. That way  will get propagated as you expect.
All of the programs that I know of will cancel it in that manner. You
should NOT have control in your sys file.

---rick