davec (01/18/83)
The previous discussions about net.sources seem to be missing a major point: when people complain about not receiving packages sent through net.sources it's not necessarily that their systems don't receive net.sources; there is a GOOD chance that the article was just dropped on the floor by uucp/news before it reached their site. As an example, we have no problems in receiving net.sources. There have been at least two major things sent through net.sources (the UCB mailer mods from watmath!bstempleton and the dirtree stuff from cwruecmp!ordy) that have never shown up here through the net.sources newsgroup. Remember, uucp/news IS NOT a reliable multi-site transfer mechanism. Process fork limits, disk space problems, uucp bugs, etc. can pop up almost arbitrarily at almost any site along a path. I even have a documented case of news itself dropping an article with no error message. Our system forwards to about seven other systems. Yesterday I had a case of an article from one of the main "net." newsgroups only get forwarded to five of those systems. There were no error messages listed in the logfile; just the five lines giving the systems that that article was being forwarded to. As a whole, from my observations on the systems I've used and from reading complaints by other people, for any given article probably at least 5% of the USENET sites never receive it. Dave Clemans Tektronix