[news.misc] VERY strange behavior at USENET/BITNET gateway

jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle) (01/07/89)

      The following message was returned to me by mail, in response to
a USENET posting to comp.society.futures.  Somehow, a strange form
of address translation was applied to the CONTENT of the message, resulting
in an attempt to interpret the 1988 election returns as Internet
addresses.

					John Nagle

   ====
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554 "|/usr/new/fanews fa.futures futures-list"... Address too long: Bad file num
554 "|/usr/new/fanews fa.futures futures-list"... Address too long: Bad file num

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Date: 4 Jan 89 17:40:03 GMT
From: jbn%glacier@wisdom.bitnet  (John B. Nagle)
Organization: Stanford University
Subject: Election results (was re: voting system)
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References: <2604@ficc.uu.net>, <292@gloom.UUCP>
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 Here is the final national vote tally for the 1988 presidential
 election:

 Candidate            Party                             Votes     %
 ==================================================,
        ===================George.Bush.Republican.48@wisdom.bitnet,
        881@wisdom.bitnet,
        011.53.37.Michael.Dukakis.Democratic.41@wisdom.bitnet,
        828@wisdom.bitnet, 350.45.67.Ron.Paul.Libertarian.431@wisdom.bitnet,
        499.0.47.Lenora.Fulani.New.Alliance.218@wisdom.bitnet,
        159.0.24.David.Duke.Populist.48@wisdom.bitnet,
        267.0.05.Eugene.McCarthy.Consumer.30@wisdom.bitnet,
        510.0.03.James.Griffin.American.Independent.27@wisdom.bitnet,
        818.0.03.Lyndon.LaRouche.National.Economic.Recovery.25@wisdom.bitnet,
        082.0.03.William.Mara.Right.to.Life.20@wisdom.bitnet,
        497.0.02.Ed.Winn.Workers.League.18@wisdom.bitnet,
        579.0.02.James.Warren.Socialist.Workers.13@wisdom.bitnet,
        338.0.01.Herbert.Lewin.Peace.and.Freedom.10@wisdom.bitnet,
        312.0.01.Earl.Dodge.Prohibition.7@wisdom.bitnet,
        984.0.01.Larry.Holmes.Workers.World.7@wisdom.bitnet,
        719.0.01.Willa.Kenoyer.Socialist.3@wisdom.bitnet,
        800.0.00.Delmar.Dennis.American.3@wisdom.bitnet,
        456.0.00.Jack.Herer.Grassroots.1@wisdom.bitnet,
        949.0.00.Louie.Youngkite.Independent.372.0.00.John.Martin.Third.World.As
        934.0.01[Statistics.quoted.from.the.Associated.Press]@wisdom.bitnet

david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) (01/07/89)

I've seen things like this happen if the blank line(s) between the
header and the body weren't truly blank but had spaces in it.

Something which happens (at least with UREP) is that files coming
in from BITNET-land have lines which are supposed to be truly
empty instead contain some number of blanks.  You would think this
would be non-destructive, but the header parser in the news software
gets confused and thinks that the first part of the body is actually
part of the header.

On a related note, sending out files with truly empty lines cause
those "records" to disappear.
-- 
<-- David Herron; an MMDF guy                              <david@ms.uky.edu>
<-- ska: David le casse\*'      {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET
<-- Now I know how Zonker felt when he graduated ...
<--          Stop!  Wait!  I didn't mean to!

IRWIN@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Irwin Tillman) (01/08/89)

In article <10836@s.ms.uky.edu>, david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) writes:

>I've seen things like this happen if the blank line(s) between the
>header and the body weren't truly blank but had spaces in it.
>
>Something which happens (at least with UREP) is that files coming
>in from BITNET-land have lines which are supposed to be truly
>empty instead contain some number of blanks.  You would think this
>would be non-destructive, but the header parser in the news software
>gets confused and thinks that the first part of the body is actually
>part of the header.

Yup.  I've found that the following situation will exhibit the
problem.  (I've tried it with inews, version B 2.11, patchlevel 14.)

Feed inews an article in which the separator line contains whitespace
AND make sure that the body of the article begins with a line containing
only whitespace.  You'll find that the second line of the body will be
concatenated with the last header.

There are several ways that sites moving news from VM to UNIX can deal
with the problem.  I'm using a news batcher on the VM side written by
Thomas Habernoll;  it does the EBCDIC->ASCII conversion, and produces
truly blank lines.  Then I send the batch as a binary file.  Another way
is to change the whitespace lines to truly blank lines once they arrive
on the UNIX side.