Subject:
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Re: NNTP Posting Broken?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.nntp
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Date:
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Mon, 18 Jun 2001 22:38:41 GMT
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Viewed:
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1039 times
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In lugnet.admin.nntp, Daniel Crichton writes:
> Frank Filz wrote:
> > Frank Filz wrote:
> > > Hmm, that one actually went through. Let's see if this response does.
> >
> > Yup, it did. I'm not sure what the heck the pattern is. I hope there's
> > enough stuff in the logs for Todd to diagnose the problem.
Aha! GOT IT!!! It was totally random and it was happening a LOT.
(Now please don't laugh when I tell you what it was :-)
> I've had 1 post go astray and not received an email confirmation for it.
> This is what I feared might happen - relying on multiple protocols to
> achieve a desired result relies not only on the apps at each end functioning
> correctly but also on the transports involved, and SMTP is not as reliable
> as might be expected for doing this. [...]
It turns out, this was just something stupid that I did. I'm *really* glad
this was something that was my fault and not SMTP's fault, and I actually
think SMTP (at least in my experience) is quite reliable for these sorts of
small messaging things, and I'm not really worried about SMTP's reliability
except in cases of someone's overflowing inbox. Anyway...
> Then again it may be a problem at the
> Lugnet server whereby it's dropping messages randomly, [...]
Yup, it was totally random. I can even tell you the probability. It was
dropping 31.47% of the articles it was supposed to detain. :-) And when I
posted 7 test articles to .off-topic.test, it dropped 2 of them (about 28.6%
of them :-).
OK, here's what it was: The code that generated the random authentication
string chose characters from a mix that included the "/" character, and it
used this internally as part of a filename, and subsequently gacked on that
when trying to spool the detained article.
When it generates the random authentication string, it makes up a string 24
characters long, and each character is (was) drawn from a set of characters
0-9, a-z, A-Z, -, and /. That means the probability of any particular
position was 63/64 (0.984375) that it wouldn't be a "/" character. Taking
63/64 to the 24th power results in approximately 0.68525752, or about a
68.5% chance that the random string wouldn't contain a "/"...or about a
31.5% chance that it *would* contain a "/".
In other words, roughly 1/3 of the supposed-to-be-detained articles were
dropped! d'Oh...Oops.
OK, well, the fix was trivial: simply remove "/" from the set of allowable
random characters. Now it just uses the 63 characters 0-9, a-z, A-Z, and -.
That's still more than plenty of random overkill, and not so much that the
generating function can be reverse-engineered.
Sorry about this horrifying glitch, folks!
--
Todd S. Lehman | LUGNET Admin <todd@lugnet.com>
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: NNTP Posting Broken?
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| "Frank Filz" <ffilz@mindspring.com> wrote in message news:3B2E1051.1F1A@m...ing.com... (...) I've had 1 post go astray and not received an email confirmation for it. This is what I feared might happen - relying on multiple protocols to achieve a (...) (23 years ago, 18-Jun-01, to lugnet.admin.nntp)
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