Seeing: Server throttled no matching entry in storage.conf storing article -- throttling

[Joe St Sauver]

>Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2000 11:41:41 +0900 (JST)
>From: Katsuhiro Kondou <kondou at nec.co.jp>
>Subject: Re: Seeing: Server throttled no matching entry in storage.conf storing
> article -- throttling
>To: inn-workers at isc.org

[excellent summary deleted]

>The size of stored article will be 999995+strlen("my_server!")=1000005.
>This does NOT match any of entries in your storage.conf, and
>your problem happens.

Okay, I've increased the upper bound on the final storage category to 
accomodate this possibility...

Would it be worthwhile to consider the following change?

-- Given that inbound article filtering takes place on the pre-path-adjusted
   length, while storage takes place on the post-path-adjusted length, it
   would seem to me that there is an ongoing opportunity to see consistency
   issues of the sort I've run into. 

-- Sure, administrators can manually adjust their storage.conf to be 
   incoming-max-article-length + length(path_entry) + 1, but I believe that 
   there is substantial likelihood that this calculation will not
   consistently occur (sort of like the problem with people misunderstanding
   the role of the ME entry in the newsfeeds file), or if it occurs, it 
   won't be documented and somewhere down the line someone will inherit
   a storage.conf file with weird magic numbers...

-- One approach might be to use either the pre-path-edition length
   throughout or to use the post-path-edition length throughout, but I don't
   think that would be a good idea. Similarly, one could posit a "fuzz" 
   value or "tolerance" (sufficiently large to accomodate most header
   additions), and apply it to article size-related calls, but again, I 
   am not very excited about that sort of approach. 

-- From my point of view, the best thing that could occur would be to
   have articles that fail to match any storage.conf category result in
   a news.notice entry, but NOT cause the server to throttle. I want the
   server to throttle only when it absolutely can't figure out what to do
   (e.g., tradspool is out of space), but I really don't want it to 
   throttle just because one crumby article can't get slotted into a 
   storage.conf category.... The automotive analogy would be that I 
   want a warning light or engine interlock if the engine is about to 
   seize up or catch fire, but I really don't want the car to disable 
   itself if all that's happening is that the windshield washer fluid 
   is beginning to run low. 

-- If the throttle ==> log a notice entry change can't occur, at a 
   minimum I'd urge a blurb in the storage.conf file alerting 
   newsadmins to the need to consider header additions in sizing
   their cut points.

Possibility?

Thanks,

Joe