Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu!karl
From: karl@cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: pseudo inews puts client hostname in "Path:" line
Message-ID: <13130@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 12 May 88 17:48:17 GMT
References: <21631@oliveb.olivetti.com>
Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Lines: 27
In-reply-to: jerry@oliveb.olivetti.com's message of 11 May 88 23:26:02 GMT

jerry@oliveb.olivetti.com writes:
   But the posting NNTP "client" most likely doesn't have news feed to it
   and most certainly doesn't have the article in question.  So inserting
   its hostname is at best un-necessary and in theory wrong.

But in our network, where news is available to all systems, undergrads
have no access to the server machine.  Hence, if we simply have
server!user in the Path: header, mail using that header will bounce.
Thus, it is very necessary to us that the client be in the Path:.

   Aside from increasing the "Path:" line unnecessarily it also increases
   the posibility of a name collision.

Not so if you make a truly trivial modification to inews.c so that it
provides a fully-qualified hostname in the Path: line.  Take a look at
this article, for example.  Yes, it makes the Path: header longer, but
I don't consider the extra 19 bytes to be of much significance.

I posted the inews.c diff to this newsgroup a couple of months ago.

   The typical work station using NNTP
   to access news has no external connections

The Sun3/50 on my desk does UUCP all by itself.  And all of our
machines have Internet access.

--Karl