Suggestion for innd feature desired by Cornell Univ

[Russ Allbery]

Todd Olson <tco2 at cornell.edu> writes:

> Following a decision by the Cornell Univ board of trustees,
> I must now change the way I operate our news server.
> Below I describe the problem
> then I describe how I would like to see INN address it
> then I describe what Cornell has done that necessitates this.
> I'd be interested if others felt this might be useful
>    or if there is already a straight forward away to solve this problem

Well, one way to solve this problem is to choose your peers carefully and
only peer with people who are running filtering software that rejects
misplaced binaries.  Cleanfeed does that, so there are a reasonable number
of people you can choose to peer from.

Other than that, this is already in the TODO file, and I agree it would be
really nice to have:

* Traffic classification as an extension of filtering.  The filter should
  be able to label traffic as binary (e.g.) without rejecting it, and
  newsfeeds should be extended to allow feeding only non-binary articles
  (e.g.) to a peer.

The syntax in the newsfeeds file is a problem.  Newsfeeds file syntax is
really annoying at present.  What we could probably do as a first pass is
something like:

    Ebinary,Ecrosspost

where the tags after the E are arbitrary tags returned by a classification
filter.  The filter would return a list of them for a given article, and
INN would check that list against the feed exclusions for each feed before
propagating the article to that feed.

How much this will really help your situation I'm not sure about, however.
My experience is that most of the sites willing to run filters of any kind
are willing to reject misplaced binaries.  But I could be wrong on that.

>       And with this feature I can then control what we send out so if
>       some disgruntalled community member posts a lot of binaries to
>       drive our costs up, they just won't get set out to our peers.

I would just reject them if they're not posted to local newsgroups.

I don't think it really does anyone any favors to accept postings to
non-local newsgroups and then not propagate them.  It always has seemed
rude to me.  As a poster, I'd rather have my message rejected up-front.

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

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