ietf-nntp Review of draft-dfncis-netnews-admin-sys-04.txt

Lawrence Greenfield leg+ at andrew.cmu.edu
Mon Apr 29 11:07:44 PDT 2002


I think this is important work if people want netnews to continue to
be a viable means of communication.  I find the current control
messages and bootstrapping (ftp a newsgroup file from...) to be hard
to fathom.

I think the proposed protocol is a little quirky (I'd rather see
something based on BEEP myself) and underspecified in several areas.
(What's a "wildmat"?  Is the ISC-INN documentation required for
successful implementation?)

What is the authentication used for?  If all of the messages are PGP
signed what is the authentication needed?  It appears to only be
attached to GETA & GETP.  Are none of the other commands security
sensitive?

Finally, there looks like there would be a huge amount of data in
response to a GETA or GETP command, and the only caching done is
all-or-none.  Is this what's envisioned?  No way for a server to send
just the things that have changed since the timestamp?  (The timestamp
should probably also have some finer granularity beyond seconds and
the requirement that it's strictly increasing.)

Finally, I'm a little confused why the package isn't defined as a MIME
type.

Larry




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