ietf-nntp Comments on the November draft

[Russ Allbery]

Charles Lindsey <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:

> I think the effect is that, without it, all you can do it relay articles
> with the IHAVE command, supposing you have that permission (perhaps a
> few other commands). That is certainly my experience the first time I
> tried to connect to an INN server to read news, and didn't give that
> command.

> What has always surprised me is that there was not a matching
> 	MODE RELAYER
> command.

If you're execing a separate program to handle readers, supporting going
back the other direction is fairly hard.  You'd have to pass the file
descriptor back to your parent and then exit without terminating the
connection.  It was probably concluded that it was a rare enough desire
that it wasn't worth the pain.

My experience is that most large news installations are moving away from
needing MODE READER; hosts are either allowed to feed or allowed to read,
not both, servers are stand-alone and don't have reading clients running
on them, and lots of people are running their reader server on a different
port from their transit server (usually transit is what moves off of 119).

> And it is not clear what "MODE" you are in if you do not give this
> command.

It's undefined, in fact.  Having the 200 codes distinguish would have been
nice, but that's a backwards compatibility nightmare.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>