ietf-nntp Issue: number range rollover

Chrisy Luke chrisy at easynet.net
Tue Dec 31 09:24:03 PST 1996


On Sat, 28 Dec 1996 22:49:00 +0000 (GMT), USENET news manager
<newsmaster at ucs.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

>(1) If anyone's reading news via NFS or direct local spool access on the
>server (yes, it still happens!), the news server has no way of knowing 
>when clients have stopped using the old numbers.
[etc]

You should probably stipulate that "this is bad", or have some other
mechanism for indicating to file-based clients that the numbering has
changed. Readers are going to have to be adapted anyway...

...so why not rewrite all the readers with an agreed maximum HWM and
rollover to 0 like a FIFO buffer. It's obvious when this is the case -
the HWM is less than the LWM. If IBM could code it into a 16kb PC BIOS
ROM for 16-byte buffered keyboard handling I'm sure you can implement
it with 32-bit numbers in a news system. No renumbering required [tm].
It's all a question of the maximum HWM being agreed on.

This then requires little other adaption of the existing systems,
server and client.

The only thing I can think of right now is modifying "article read"
lists to be purged of numbers that fall below the LWM. Other than
that, very little needs to be done.

Chris.

== chrisy at easynet.net, chrisy at flirble.org.uk, chrisy at etsiig.uniovi.es
== Newsmaster and Senior Systems Developer for Easynet Group Plc.
== Someone once said A Flirble is like Christmas. Only more so. With
== less of the fuzzy bits and more of the haze.      They were wrong.



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