Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mit-eddie!bu-cs!mirror!frog!john
From: john@frog.UUCP (John Woods)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Empty News Articles
Message-ID: <1299@X.UUCP>
Date: 6 Dec 88 01:57:00 GMT
References: <341@igor.Rational.COM> <53200002@uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu> <779@mannix.iros1.UUCP>
Organization: Servants of the Great White Frog
Lines: 37

In article <779@mannix.iros1.UUCP>, goutier@ouareau.iro.umontreal.ca (Claude Goutier) writes:
H> In respect to the loss of articles due to lack of disk space (a problem
o> which frustrated me of some good news also), it should not depend on the
w> fact that write allocate immediately to the disk or not.
 >  
t> The right think to do is to not consider an article received unless the
o> text has been correctly written to disk and the descriptors properly set.
 > This way, if anything goes wrong, the articles is still "not received"
d> and will be pick up (hopefully) on the next delivery. It is also nice,
o> if any abnormal condition occurs, to undo what so far has been done and
 > has not been completed.
it.>  

Generally the sending system has no idea what happens on the receiving system.
It is thus up to the receiving system to beg for a repeat.

One way to accomplish this would be to have rnews cons up a "sendme" control
article for lost messages.  A complication of this is that you would need to
have space somewhere for the control article.  Also, earlier versions of news
would record articles as received even if they were garbled in writing, but
2.11.13 doesn't (I think); you might need to run expire -r (rebuild) to have
those entries removed from the history file.  The "sendme" article can be
crafted by hand by looking through the /usr/lib/news/log file and plucking
out the failure messages.

Possibly an easier solution would be to have the sending system send an
"ihave" control message containing all of the articles that it has.  I would
personally like to see the netnews protocol extended to have a "whatchagot"
control message to elicit one of these automatically; in the absense of that,
a friendly feed might set up a shell script that could be uux-ed (or otherwise
remotely executed) that would create one; a friendlier but security-conscious
feed might be willing to do that by hand on rare occaisions...
-- 
John Woods, Charles River Data Systems, Framingham MA, (617) 626-1101
...!decvax!frog!john, john@frog.UUCP, ...!mit-eddie!jfw, jfw@eddie.mit.edu

Go be a `traves wasswort.		- Doug Gwyn