ietf-nntp Timeout in a POST (or IHAVE) command

[Charles Lindsey]

In <ylu20noiaw.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:


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

>> There is the related problem of the server wanting to stop the transfer
>> of an article from a client (having seen the first 15MB, and there being
>> no indication that there is a further 15MB to follow ...). Currently,
>> the only solution is to drop the connection, which is a bit drastic.

>Why do you feel so?  It seems like an entirely reasonable approach to me.

Suppose A feeds B using IHAVE. Suppose B has a policy not to carry
articles greater than 1MB. So B wants to stop all article transfers as
soon as 1MB is reached.

At present, this means dropping the connection, A has to reconnect, and
will doubtless offer the same article again using IHAVE, and B will have
to remember that is has already seen that article once and didn't like
what it saw last time, so will refuse it now. Remember that there is no
guarantee that A will resume by sending exactly that same article first,
so B will have to keep an arbitrarily long list of articles to be rejected
on sight (well, maybe a dummy history file entry would do it).

This is all a messy way to run a protocol. I was just aksing what kind of
entension we might propose in future to let B reject articles tidily.

-- 
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