ietf-nntp Response codes - generic

[Russ Allbery]

Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:

> In practice, many commands use 502 to mean "not permitted at present"
> and 503 to mean "not supported in this implementation". There's also a
> need for generic codes for "service about to break", "can't provide this
> right now", and "something went wrong in the server". The only 40x codes
> in the draft are:

>     400 greeting and MODE READER meaning "service temporarily unavailable"
>     400 LIST EXTENSIONS "service no longer available"
>     402 LIST EXTENSIONS meaning "no extensions"

Why is "no extensions" a temporary failure?  Is it going to change if it's
tried again later?  Wouldn't returning an empty multiline reply with a
successful code make more sense?

> I would therefore suggest that we reword this area to provide a set of
> generic responses which could be returned by any command. The set I
> would define are:

>     400 service temporarily unavailable (TCP connection is then closed)
>     401 service about to shut down temporarily
>     403 facility temporarily unavailable
>     500 unrecognised command
>     501 syntax error in command
>     502 not authorised
>     503 optional feature not supported

I think I agree with this suggestion (although I've not done my promised
audit of INN yet).

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