Xref: utzoo news.software.b:1562 news.config:873
Path: utzoo!linus!necntc!ames!mailrus!emv
From: emv@mailrus.cc.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.config
Subject: Re: Solution to news dup site names
Message-ID: <645@mailrus.cc.umich.edu>
Date: 20 Aug 88 05:09:50 GMT
References: <1445@datapg.MN.ORG> <20246@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <1474@datapg.MN.ORG>
Sender: usenet@mailrus.cc.umich.edu
Reply-To: emv@mailrus.cc.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti)
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Organization: University of Michigan Computing Center, Ann Arbor
Lines: 60

In article <1474@datapg.MN.ORG> sewilco@datapg.MN.ORG (Scot E Wilcoxon) writes:
>In article <20246@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) writes:
>>sewilco@datapg.MN.ORG writes:
>>   News sites with the same name are invisible to each other.
>>
>>Why not just have fully-qualified domain names in the Path: header?
>
>To keep the Path: header from becoming inconveniently long.  This
>might be defined as either "too large for a buffer" or "longer than
>the text of the message".

True enough.  Long path names are a problem.  As matt@oddjob proved
some time this summer (matt?) there's a point at which the long
path line will cause the existing news software to break.  I don't
think it was # of hops, more like total character length (on
the order of 3 lines or 240 characters as I recall.)  Even
if the existing news software works, the longer the paths
in terms of # of hops and also # of characters the harder it
is for people with brain-dead news software and mailers (i.e.
without INTERNET defined) to reply to news postings easily.
That describes most of the AT&T news network, for instance.

I doubt that the addition of 7 characters to your name will
make a big difference, considering the leaf-ness of your site.
But people like Karl who shoot a lot of news around with
22 character site names might make a dent in the limits
some time, if the net grows too big.

The real problem is that "the net is getting too big", or at
the very least it's not unlikely that path lengths will grow,
not shrink, in the near future.  That is, unless you take
action to keep them in check.

What you can do to help this situation out in the long run is
to be sure that your own articles get propogated as widely and
cheaply as possible.  One good metric of this is "how many hops
does it take my posting to get to uunet?"  (I'm guilty in this
respect - we stopped feeding uunet when umix, our aging vax,
started to have mail back up because of news feeds, thus violating
the Prime Directive.)  If you know that you're one or two or
even three hops away from uunet, you could have a system name
like starbarlounge.upie.cc.umich.edu and no one would bat an eye.

If you're on the internet, and you have multiple feeds with NNTP,
and you've noticed that some of them "aren't worth it" because you
never end up sending any articles across that link - that's 
a perfect opportunity to cut down the size of the network.
Reduce the link to an L4 or L5 style connection instead of a
full feed, and you'll have only relatively local traffic pass
over that connection.  That'll reduce load on both machines,
not queueing up articles that don't have a good chance of 
being accepted on the far end.

I'm cross posting this to news.config because it's not just
a software issue, it's a topology issue.  

--Ed
usenet news admin, U of Michigan.

(mailrus - 7 characters, not bad....)