I found out there are two reasons this is happening, I just found the first, and that was a malformed Xref header from the host. Here's an example of the last on in my logs. I guess it's some kind of bug in INN. Path: netaxs.com!news-xfer.netaxs.com!feta.direct.ca!newsfeed.direct.ca!news.maxwell.syr.edu!supernews.com!Supernews69!not-for-mail From: theedge@localnet.com (Jim U'Ren) Newsgroups: alt.marketplace,alt.marketplace.collectables Subject: WTS: Inch the Catapiller Beanie Baby Date: 29 Aug 1997 19:10:23 GMT Organization: All USENET -- http://www.Supernews.com Lines: 10 Message-ID: <5u76qv$t23$3@e3000.supernews.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 29763@206.84.153.44 X-Newsreader: WinVN 0.99.8 (16bit) Xref: netaxs.com THE REAL PROBLEM that generates bunches of these is that when you ask for an article by id, nntpcache will interrogate all the servers it know about looking for that article, and when it finds it, if that server isn't authorized for that group, the Xrefmungewhatever function returns an empty an empty Xref line. With my suggested patch, crosspost doesn't get the article number, so it tries to xpath it from the server it got t he answer from. If it gets one, it merrily caches the article away, and you could now get it again out of the cache if you knew the article ID. A side effect of this process is that you can read news off a server by article ID that's in a group you couldn't get to by message id. Given an article ID, nntpcache will try real hard to give you the article. I'm going to keep running for awhile with my patch, it seems to do more good than harm. At least the log is quieter. -- Aaron Nabil nabil@teleport.com
