| Subject: (4.23) Should I distribute control messages? |
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|Newsgroups: news.software.nntp |Subject: Re: Pros & cons of passing control.* downstream? |References: <82rakz8r4p.fsf@dove.eecs.umich.edu> |From: David C Lawrence <tale@uunet.uu.net> |Date: 09 Dec 1996 17:47:46 -0500 |Message-ID: <8682bxrl9.fsf@rodan.UU.NET>Michael Hucka <hucka@eecs.umich.edu> writes: > The INN man pages say one would not normally want to send out control.* to > one's peer news servers. But what are the actual pros and cons of doing it?The con of doing it is that local control messages will propagate far and wide, creating groups at distant servers that were meant to be local. These groups will then attract articles that aren't really desired at the home site for the local groups. It will also look like a path for articles for the groups exist when in fact it doesn't, because non-control articles will not propagate down the same path. This all applies to other messages sites might have intended to keep local, notably including checkgroups. Cancels are largely irrelevant in this except by generating a lot of administrative traffic to cancel articles at the receiving site that it didn't get. The very weak pro for doing so is that a site with only a limited feed can see newgroup messages for groups it might want. However, admins can get this information via other mechanisms so I do not believe this pro outweighs the negatives of leaked local control messages. ------------------------------ [Last Changed: $Date: 1997/08/26 01:26:21 $ $Revision: 2.19 $] [Copyright: 1997 Heiko Rupp, portions by Tom Limoncelli, Rich Salz, et al.] |
