[NNTP] Interesting server behaviour

[Russ Allbery]

River Tarnell <river at RT.UK.EU.ORG> writes:

> (Re-sending because my first message didn't appear -- sorry if this 
> shows up twice.)

Hm, not sure what happened there.  I didn't see it get caught in the
moderation queue.  I'll check the list settings and make sure it wasn't
silently throwing something away.

> I just noticed the following rather unfortunate behaviour from one 
> widely-used NNTP server:

> % telnet 69.16.177.254 nntp
> Trying 69.16.177.254...
> Connected to voer-me.highwinds-media.com.
> Escape character is '^]'.
> 200 (cyclone01.ams2) -- Welcome (Cyclone v2.4.1.749-3)
> CAPABILITIES
> 500 Syntax Error or Unknown Command
> Connection closed by foreign host.

> So 6 years after RFC 3799 was published, it's still impossible in
> practice to use CAPABILITIES to discover streaming.

Yeah.  This unfortunately was something that we were somewhat expecting,
given how long the standardization process took and the gentle decline of
NNTP technology in general.  Not a lot of active work is going on in this
area, so there hasn't been a lot of incentive to refit older software and
move into compliance with the standard.

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