From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Wed Jan 02 2002 - 15:30:12 CST
Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> For example, Russ uses this in order to ensure that certain local groups
> are not allowed to leak outside of the Stanford campus. I cannot,
> however, imagine any use of this feature other than within such
> cooperating subnets.
I really dislike that term "cooperating subnet" because it's not clear
what it means. It's used elsewhere in our draft for situations where one
can just break the protocols for one's own purposes, which isn't the case
for the sorts of cooperating subnets that we're talking about here.
Use of distrib.pats is not uncommon for things like geographically
regional hierarchies that shouldn't be distributed outside of that region.
It's also used to control distribution of certain hierarchies, and used to
filter spam out of other hierarchies. slac.*, for example, is distributed
essentially Usenet-wide, but requires a Distribution header of slac
(preferrably added automatically by distrib.pats) for the articles to be
accepted at our servers and likely others.
It also used to be widely used to add Distribution: inet to articles in
the INET groups, although that usage is now deprecated and most servers
that used to do that have since been upgraded (INN used to come with a
distrib.pats file with the appropriate entries).
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>