mark (10/26/82)
First, there is no such newsgroup as net.netnews, the correct group is net.news. Second, the scheme of using time(0) % 10000000 as the sequence number will not work in general. It uses 7 characters for the number. Since article ID's must be legal and unique file names, this leaves only 6 characters for the site name. Site names can be up to 8 characters for purposes of the article ID. If you reduce the time modulus to 100000, you get it looping roughly every day - certainly not long enough. A better long term solution would be to fix the filesystems on these sites to be reliable enough to not clobber the seq file. Until this is done, there is no reason ihlpb can't continue to use this scheme, since it doesn't break anything elsewhere, but it is important to realize that it only works because their site name is only 5 characters long. It is not a solution for everyone. Mark