From: Kai Henningsen (kaih@khms.westfalen.de)
Date: Sat Nov 13 1999 - 07:00:00 CST
rra@stanford.edu (Russ Allbery) wrote on 04.11.99 in <ylg0yl1v64.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu>:
> Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
>
> > I think if you want to keep them, you have to give a reason why they
> > might be useful. I cannot see any _genuine_ application for them with
> > the present size of Usenet. Does anybody else want to keep them?
>
> It was discussed on inn-workers, and general consensus was that sendsys
> could go and good riddance, but we wanted to keep support for version.
> The idea was that the INN maintainers could have a registered public key,
> there could be an entry in control.ctl commented out by default that
> allowed version queries from that key, and people who wanted to allow the
> INN maintainers to gather statistical information about what versions of
> INN were in use could uncomment that line if they so chose.
You better pray that this doesn't work.
An incident like this (but using sendsys) took Germany off the net some
years ago (back when international SMTP mail went through only a few
machines).
SMTP servers really, really do not like being contacted by tens of
thousands of machines at the same time.
MfG Kai