🚀 go-pugleaf

This question is more general than Demon-only, but there're certainly
people on here who know the answer, and it's at least vaguely
relevant ;-).

I'm writing a news transport/reader system. (Why? Because it's for Acorn
machines, which aren't already saturated with good news software.)
My question is to do with how to propagate articles from the local
system.

Suppose a local user posts an article. The local server will collect
it (probably via NNTP POST, but it doesn't really matter) and insert
it into the local news spool. Because the article is now in the Usenet
news system (albeit on only one machine), it should be propagated to
other news servers using IHAVE, not POST.

This is all fine, *but* when we connect to the provider's news server,
we might get an INN NNRPd, in which case IHAVE won't work. Under most
PC-based systems, the customers are going to use POST, because their
local machine isn't going to have done all the nice checking and
tidying that inews/NNTP POST would do.

I checked 'news.demon.co.uk', and it does support IHAVE. But maybe
'pubnews' doesn't, or maybe IHAVE is unsupported even on 'news', and quite
likely other providers' news servers won't allow customers to use IHAVE,
especially with the problem of forgeries. (If the provider can't be
bothered to keep NNTP logs, disallowing IHAVE is a good way to get around
the problem. ;-) )

So... any suggestions? What do UNIX-ey people do, who're running INN
or somesuch off a dial-up ISP? That would try IHAVE... wouldn't it?
Should I try IHAVE and then fall back on POST if IHAVE doesn't work...
despite the fact that we're *not* posting an article, we're just
propagating it? This would be very unpleasant, as conceptually the
article would enter Usenet, leave it, and then enter it again, and it
could fail on the second entry despite succeeding on the first, for example
due to the ISP's server having a stricter configuration. (e.g. Pipex's
server complains about excessive quoting, I think.)

Cheers


Jon
____
\  // Jon Ribbens // jon@doggysoft.co.uk   //
 \// http://www.csv.warwick.ac.uk/~esveb/ //