ietf-nntp Virtual hosts in NNTP servers

[Russ Allbery]

Joao Prado Maia <jpm at papercut.org> writes:

> They will obviously ask the reason for them needing to enter an
> 'anonymous' type user and mark 'My server requires authentication' in
> something that doesn't really require authentication - that's the
> definition of anonymous access, after all.

> Is it just me or does this smell too much like a hack ?

It's a hack, but it's a hack that's also widely used by other protocols
with this same issue.  I don't think anyone's saying that a HOST command
wouldn't be cleaner, just that it turns out not to be strictly necessary.

I have no objections to someone writing up a HOST extension that behaves
as you specify.  I would just expect to need to allow AUTHINFO as well for
some time to support older clients, even if it caught on.

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