NETCHRS in defs.h might need tweaking

[Whitewater Wombat]

The constant string NETCHRS in defs.h for news 2.10.3 beta may need
some adjustment if your hostnames contain periods. This string is
apparently contains characters which may be used to separate host
names on various networks (e.g. "!"), one of which is currently ".".
Well, since domain names tend to contain a lot of periods, news tends
to get rather confused. Specifically, we observed hosts ping-ponging
news back and forth since host "i.cc.purdue.edu" thought news originating
from host "j.cc.purdue.edu" was really from host "edu".

Of course, all the bounced articles were rejected, but with 11 local
hosts exchanging news, the traffic was horrible...a few local articles
apparently escaped off-campus in the confusion. I "fixed" the problem
by removing "." from NETCHRS; I figure that since domain names use
"." as a separator, that we won't see host names separated with "."
in the future. I hope I'm right.
--
Rich Kulawiec, pucc-j!rsk, r...@j.cc.purdue.edu

[Erik E. Fair]

It is my understanding from Rick Adams that the 2.11 release of netnews
will not have "." in the NETCHRS variable. I removed it from the
NETCHRS list on the systems where I administrate netnews some time ago
because of some problems related to gatewaying materials from the ARPA
Internet into USENET.

Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fa...@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu
styx!fair fa...@lll-tis-b.arpa