tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) (02/12/89)
We have a group here at Rensselaer named rpi.acm.3B2. Trying to post
to this group from GNUS bombs because the group name somehow comes to
be "rpi.acm.3b2". I am not sure whether it is inews that does the
conversion to lowercase or GNUS, but I suspect it might be the latter
because other people can successfully post to the group through their
interfaces. It is possible the converison to lowercase is correct; I
have not dug into the RFC to check.
On a tangent note, why do articles retrieved via message-id have to
include the <> characters? Since all message-ids have them, why not
provide them through GNUS if they are not already given by the user?
Dave
--
tale@rpitsmts.bitnet, tale%mts@rpitsgw.rpi.edu, tale@pawl.rpi.eduumerin@photon.stars.flab.fujitsu.junet (Masanobu UMEDA) (02/22/89)
Date: 11 Feb 89 20:41:51 GMT From: flab!fgw!uunet!pawl.rpi.edu!tale (David C Lawrence) Organization: The Octagon Room We have a group here at Rensselaer named rpi.acm.3B2. Trying to post to this group from GNUS bombs because the group name somehow comes to be "rpi.acm.3b2". In fact, GNUS does nothing about the case of newsgroup name. To know what is happenning, try the following: telnet SERVER 119 [RET] group rpi.acm.3B2 [RET] [the reply comes here.] If the reply says "411 Invalid group name.", that is the problem of nntpd or something else. On a tangent note, why do articles retrieved via message-id have to include the <> characters? Since all message-ids have them, why not provide them through GNUS if they are not already given by the user? The next coming GNUS will do. Anyway, sorry for my late reply. Our gateway was down these days. Masanobu UMEDA umerin@flab.Fujitsu.JUNET umerin%flab.Fujitsu.JUNET@uunet.uu.NET
bob@tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) (02/22/89)
In article <8902220520.AA00690@photon.stars.flab.fujitsu.junet> umerin@photon.stars.flab.fujitsu.junet (Masanobu UMEDA) writes:
Date: 11 Feb 89 20:41:51 GMT
From: flab!fgw!uunet!pawl.rpi.edu!tale (David C Lawrence)
We have a group here at Rensselaer named rpi.acm.3B2. Trying to
post to this group from GNUS bombs because the group name
somehow comes to be "rpi.acm.3b2".
In fact, GNUS does nothing about the case of newsgroup name... If
the reply says "411 Invalid group name.", that is the problem of
nntpd or something else.
RFC1036 "Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages" says nothing
about the case of the letters in a newsgroup name. However, RFC977
"Network News Transfer Protocol" has a couple of comments.
Section 2.3 (Commands) says: "Commands and command parameters are not
case sensitive. That is, a command or parameter word may be upper
case, lower case, or any mixture of upper and lower case."
Section 3.2.1 (the describing the GROUP command) says: "Note that the
name of the newsgroup is not case-dependent. It must otherwise match
a newsgroup obtained from the LIST command or an error will result."
This would seem to indicate that if a newsgroup already exists on the
server machine with a mixed-case name, then you must specify it in
GROUP the same as it came from LIST. What's the ruling from the
Talmudic scholars of news.software.nntp? Is the existing NNTP
software, or perhaps the existing inews, in violation of the RFCs?tale@its.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) (02/22/89)
Further inspection of the problem has led to this:
telnet> o rpi.edu 119
Trying 128.113.1.5 ...
Connected to rpi.
Escape character is '^]'.
200 rpi NNTP server version 1.5 (26 Feb 88) ready at Wed Feb 22 10:53:45 1989 (posting ok).
group rpi.acm.3b2
411 Invalid group name.
group rpi.acm.3B2
211 1 3 3 rpi.acm.3B2
slave
202 Kinky, kinky. I don't support such perversions.
quit
205 rpi closing connection. Goodbye.
Now, since Masanobu says GNUS doesn't do anything to newsgroup name,
and the NNTP server doesn't do anything to the name it receives, I
suspect that it is something wrong in inews. People using Pnews from
rn don't have any trouble posting to the group. So now, and inews
people out there who can account for this?
Thanks.
Dave
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tale@rpitsmts.bitnet, tale%mts@rpitsgw.rpi.edu, tale@pawl.rpi.edubrian@ucsd.EDU (Brian Kantor) (02/23/89)
Well, I don't know about Talmudic authority on this, but there are two problems here: 1) you can't have a newsgroup name that starts with a number 2) you can't have a newsgroup name with upper-case in it #1 is a news software restriction (not NNTP); I think #2 is also (but I've been wrong before!). So call it 'rpi.x.att3b2' or something. Shalom, Brian Kantor UCSD Postmaster & Chief News Weenie UCSD B-028, La Jolla, CA 92093 USA brian@ucsd.edu BRIAN@UCSD ucsd!brian
fair@Apple.COM (Erik E. Fair) (02/27/89)
In the referenced article, bob@tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) writes: > >RFC1036 "Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages" says nothing >about the case of the letters in a newsgroup name. However, RFC977 >"Network News Transfer Protocol" has a couple of comments. > > Section 2.3 (Commands) says: "Commands and command parameters are not > case sensitive. That is, a command or parameter word may be upper > case, lower case, or any mixture of upper and lower case." > > Section 3.2.1 (the describing the GROUP command) says: "Note that the > name of the newsgroup is not case-dependent. It must otherwise match > a newsgroup obtained from the LIST command or an error will result." > >This would seem to indicate that if a newsgroup already exists on the >server machine with a mixed-case name, then you must specify it in >GROUP the same as it came from LIST. What's the ruling from the >Talmudic scholars of news.software.nntp? Is the existing NNTP >software, or perhaps the existing inews, in violation of the RFCs? While I've never been accused of being a rabbi, I think I can take a crack at this. Case sensitive newsgroup names are a bad idea, because not all operating systems support case sensitive names and netnews is in use on a lot of very different systems (and this is hardly an issue of "modern" versus "ancient" software; there are some examples of "modern" operating systems that are in popular use that are not case sensitive). We felt (and I think I can speak for Phil & Brian here) that there should be no distinction between foo.bar and FOO.bar and foo.BAR and fOo.BaR, so we put it that way in the spec. What this means for servers on UNIX systems is that you never use a mixed-case newsgroup name. So much for comp.sys.NeXT or comp.windows.NeWS. Erik E. Fair apple!fair fair@apple.com