ietf-nntp Comments on the November draft

Andrew Gierth andrew at erlenstar.demon.co.uk
Thu Nov 11 21:29:06 PST 1999


>>>>> "Russ" == Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

 [MODE READER]

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

This is certainly true.

But changing the spec in such a way as to make it hard to run both
transit & readers on one port is potentially a big nuisance for small
installations. I know that not all of my peers (of my small personal
server) find it convenient to send feeds to alternate ports; I would
guess that the vast majority of transit feeds still use port 119.

Right now, for maximum interoperability, reader clients SHOULD issue
the MODE READER command before trying to do anything else.

-- 
Andrew.



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