🚀 go-pugleaf

In the referenced article, mathew <mathew@mantis.co.uk> writes:
> Recently there have been a couple of instances of people posting enormous
> uuencoded files in one piece, causing various systems to crash.
> 
> One person posted 400K in one chunk to alt.sex.pictures; another posted an
> enormous file of sampled sounds to alt.fan.monty-python.
> 
> People seem to think that something should be done. I suggest that any
> posting longer than a certain threshold length should be dropped, and an
> error report mailed to the originator [...]
> 
> True, it's easy to get around the limit by splitting the file into bits;
> but I believe that most of the net.bandwidth.abuse which goes on is down to
> simple ignorance. [...]

I think the statements about "getting around the limit" in the above
posting shows that the author seems to be confusing two "problems" [I
put "problems" in quotes as I am not willing to admit that either is
sufficiently obnoxious so as to require a software-based correction]:

	1) Certain large individual articles may harm particular systems 
	by filling up disk partitions allocated to news or causing 
	transport-level (e.g., UUCP) problems; and

	2) Certain individual posters are thought to abuse the network by
	posting too many bytes (in the aggregate) in too short a period.

If #1 is seen to be the problem, then there is nothing wrong with
"getting around the limit" by splitting large encoded articles into
parts.  This is the accepted practice in groups that contain uuencoded
binaries or image files.  All that a site needs to do is reject
incoming postings that are longer than a certain site-specified
threshold.  I would support a modification to the news transport software
that implemented this.  There is no need to send complaining mail to
anyone or their site administrator about large postings; just drop
them if your site can't handle them.  It's your site's problem, not
the network, so I suggest fixing the problem there.

If #2 is seen to be the problem, we will need some very sophisticated
software to sum up and drop/complain about agreegate postings by an
individual.  I personally don't see the need.

As far as our site is concerned, large postings do not (yet) cause a
problem.  We got the massive Monty Python article and it got posted
like anything else and expired when appropriate like anything else.
(We receive news via NNTP which is able to handle arbitrarily large
articles, and have a decent-sized news partition.)  Sites which are
affected by large articles should either install filters to protect
themselves, or drop those groups in which large articles often appear,
i.e., the binary and image groups.

--
Michael C. Berch  
mcb@presto.ig.com / uunet!presto.ig.com!mcb / ames!bionet!mcb