From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Oct 04 1999 - 06:57:10 CDT
In <ylr9jdnlrj.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>Except just as there are circumstances in which you want to receive
>articles with old Date headers (backfilling a server from another, for
>example), there are circumstances when you want to reforward articles to a
>peer.
Sure, but then the two sites concerned are just operating a cooperating
subnet for some immediate purpose. The important thing is that you don't
want to let these articles out onto the wider net.
>But I agree that putting restrictions on the forwarding is better than
>putting restrictions on the acceptance; news servers can obviously
>implement that by restricting acceptance. This one may call for an
>"except in special circumstances" sort of exception.
Except that there exist (AIUI) some relayers which are not also servers,
and just forward everything they receive, on the assumption that what came
in was already well-formed, and therefore safe to forward without detailed
examination.
The effect we want to achieve is that _sufficient_ agents around the place
are doing this check to ensure that stale articles do not propagate very
far. So the question is how best to word this. At the moment, I have said
that serving agents MUST do it. Other suggestions? (Such as making it just
a SHOULD).
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Voice/Fax: +44 161 437 4506 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5