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) Distribution: na 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....)