ietf-nntp "compliance" verus "administrative control"

[Stan Barber]

This discussion about NEWNEWS does bring up the larger issues of 
software compliance and administrative control. Originally, most TCP based
protocols (like SMTP and NNTP, for example) did not provide for much 
administrative control over the execution of various commands as part of
the protocol definition. Today, that is different. Should standards documents
specify which commands are eligible for having execution of those commands 
under site administrative control? If so, which NNTP commands should 
administrative control be permitted and which commands should be forbidden 
such control? After all, if all commands are permitted, then clients may not 
be able to get any reasonable work done with the subset provided to them by 
the administrator.

It does strike me as reasonable to define a set of commands as "restrictable"
by administrative policy, but I don't think it is reasonable for all of them 
to be.

To that end, we probably should define a new 5XX response code for this
and not overload the current ones. Also, what commands should be on which
list?


-- 
Stan   | Academ Consulting Services        |internet: sob at academ.com
Olan   | For more info on academ, see this |uucp: {mcsun|amdahl}!academ!sob
Barber | URL- http://www.academ.com/academ |Opinions expressed are only mine.