On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 06:29:58PM +0000, Jonathan Larmour wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote:
> > You probably want to edit ng.c, look down for nntp_stat_id(), and after
> > the (art < 0) check add something that inspects the NNTP code at the
> > start of ser_line and does 'goto reask_article' if it's 499.
>
> Unfortunately it's likely that if the upstream server is down, then
> reasking for it won't make any difference for maybe an hour.
reask_article isn't brilliantly named, perhaps - it doesn't reask the
server for the article, but actually takes you back to the "What next?"
article prompt. You might want to print some kind of message that the
article is temporarily unavailable.
> > I'll leave it to wiser heads to decide whether nntpcache is doing the
> > right thing.
>
> It's possible that it's just a deficiency in RFC977 that it doesn't allow
> temporary failures - unless there's a subsequent RFC which adds it?
It's not clear in the current Internet-Draft [1], although that document
does at least define x9x as "Reserved for private use (non-standard
extensions)" rather than for debugging.
The only thing I can find in the draft that comes close to this is:
If the server does not provide an optional feature, then the
response code 403 MUST be returned if the omission is
temporary (e.g. because a necessary facility is unavailable)
and the code 503 if it is permanent (e.g. because the server
does not store the required information).
... although of course that shouldn't be used as a reference yet.
[1] http://ftp.rge.com/pub/usenet/transport/nntp/ietf/nntpext.txt.gz
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
