[ietf-nntp] new NNTP standard, comments

Guy Middleton guy at obstruction.com
Sat Mar 13 12:20:23 PST 2004


[Also posted to news.software.nntp]

I have recently encountered a news server which drops the connection
immediately, without sending a response, upon being sent any unknown command.
This seems to me to be fragile at best, and a violation of the "be liberal in
what you accept" principle.

The administrators of the server claim that this is correct behaviour.  I
can't find anything in RFC977 that explicitly disallows this, although it
seems obvious to me that this is wrong.

This is annoying because clients (TRN in particular, there may be others),
send non-standard commands (such as XMODE READER and XTHREAD DBINIT).  A
reasonable server would reply with a 500 error, and the client could continue.

I would like to see language disallowing this in the new standard, if
possible.

Section 3.2.1 says this now: "If the command is not recognised, or it is an
optional command or extension that is not implemented by the server, the
response code 500 MUST be returned".  This could be read to prohibit
disconnection, but it would be nice if the standard could make the prohibition
explicit.



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