ietf-nntp Response from ARTICLE

[Charles Lindsey]

In <19981002102856.I5632 at demon.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:

>John Line said:

>> The definition
>>             5xx - Command unimplemented, or incorrect, or a serious
>>                program error occurred.
>> hardly supports use of 502 as the response to connection by an unauthorised 
>> client,

>I've always understood the encoding scheme as:

>   4xx - something's broken right now, try again later
>   5xx - you might as well give up; some configuration thing would
>         have to change or you'd have to use a different parameter
>         for this to work

Yes, that is my informal reading of the wording in the present draft.

>Thus for mail, recipient unavailable is a 4xx issue while nonexistent
>domain is a 5xx one. On this basis, 5xx is the right group for permission
>denied.

Well No! It is the right return for "permission denied because you are
unwelcome to speak to this server", but it seems an overkill for
"permission denied to read this particular article, but please feel free
to ask for other articles (for which permission will likely be granted)".

That was precisely the situation that started this thread. Seemingly it
was a net.* article (still not clear to my why NEWNEWS offered it to me,
because I had not asked for any net.*, but that is another issue).
Seemingly, I am not trusted to read net.*. But my software (a much hacked
version of nntpxfer) decided any 5xx return was fatal (I have fixed it
now, of course).

So I would have thought some 4xx response would be more appropriate in
this situation.

I now see from the minutes of the recent IETF meeting, as published on
this list, that there is an intent to list this 502 specifically in this
circumstance. I think we should be looking closely at that.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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