🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Bu7y4o.6s6@ux1.isu.edu> rhys@cs.uq.oz.au writes:
|   
|   Here's a technical question related to small networks in the outer regions
|   of USENET: is it a good idea to modify Path: headers as they pass out of
|   the small net into the world at large?

				[...]

How exactly does the news software look at "Path:" headers and prevent loops
in the feeding of articles?

|   not entering.  Hopefully this will prevent another UUCP site with the name
|   "hosta" or "hostb" missing our news....

Why doesn't the news software just look at the first component of the path,
and match that with the list of outgoing feeds? I know the obvious answer:
that way, you don't get to prevent multi-hop loops. But even that can be
stopped by adopting a related mechanism: when I get an article which I've
already received, I don't re-accept it (thanks to the old records in the
history file) and I _don't_forward_it_either_. This way, I break all
duplicate article flow to me and through me, without anyone looking at the
path header at all.

What is the problem then? Seems to me that this approach is better than
path-based filtering. Am I missing anything?  Basically, it seems to me
that there is duplication of information somewhere. Each site already has a
history database of current and (slightly) old article ID's. This database
is good enough to prevent all propagation of duplicates. Why do we need the
additional path headers? One saving is of course, the transmission cost on
the last leg of a multi-hop loop. Is that the _only_ reason to use this
path based mechanism?


And second question: is the Path header used at all for replying to an
article? I thought the Sender and the From headers were used.

(Hope this article is not inappropriate here; should I have posted to
 news.software.b instead????)
							Shuvam

-- Shuvam Misra --------------------------- shuvam@jogin.cse.iitb.ernet.in --
-- Research Engr, Mach Project ----------------------------------------------
-- Dept of Computer Science, Indian Instt of Technology, Bombay 400076 ------
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