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

Andrew Gierth andrew at erlenstar.demon.co.uk
Mon Jul 9 09:44:52 PDT 2001


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

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

 Charles> At present, this means dropping the connection,

actually what happens at present, with IHAVE feeds, is that B will
absorb the article regardless of how big it is (discarding the data),
and then return a normal rejection code.

This is not really much of a problem because if B is getting too many
rejections due to size, then it will ask A to size-limit the feed; and
the fact that essentially all sites have a size limit of some sort
means that you don't get 100MB articles flying around between servers.

The point where this sort of thing becomes a problem is with POST,
where a broken or misconfigured client will happily sit there pumping
hundreds of megabytes of data at you.

-- 
Andrew.



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