«

On 2009-11-11, ~BD~ <BoaterDave'remove'@hotmail.co.uk> wrote:

[...]

> 1. news.microsoft.com
>
> 2. msnews.microsoft.com
>
> I'm using Thunderbird 2 for this exercise. I have each of these accounts
> set up with, as far as I can tell, the same settings. I then newly
> subscribed to the following newsgroup in each account ...
>
> 'microsoft.public.test.here'
>
> Messages were duly downloaded onto my machine. In the case of 1. above,
> there were 361 messages downloaded (indicated alongside the newsgroup
> name). In the case of 2. above, there were just 181 messages downloaded,
> according to the indication shown alongside the newsgroup.
>
> The identical figures were also indicated at the bottom right hand
> corner of the Thunderbird window in each case.

[...]

> There must be a reason for the number of messages being different. I'd
> be most grateful for your thoughts on why you think this might be.
>
> I appreciate that it is probably an unimportant detail. I am simply curious!
>
> Thanks for helping - if you do!

Both servers (if they are indeed two, not one) seem to have the same
content in that group at the moment:

$ telnet news.microsoft.com nntp
Trying 207.46.248.16...
Connected to news.microsoft.com (207.46.248.16).
Escape character is '^]'.
200 NNTP Service 6.0.3790.3959 Version: 6.0.3790.3959 Posting Allowed
GROUP microsoft.public.test.here
211 66 17627 17704 microsoft.public.test.here
quit
205 closing connection - goodbye!
Connection closed by foreign host.
$

and

$ telnet msnews.microsoft.com nntp
Trying 207.46.248.16...
Connected to msnews.microsoft.com (207.46.248.16).
Escape character is '^]'.
200 NNTP Service 6.0.3790.3959 Version: 6.0.3790.3959 Posting Allowed
GROUP microsoft.public.test.here
211 66 17627 17704 microsoft.public.test.here
quit
205 closing connection - goodbye!
Connection closed by foreign host.
$

ie 66 articles, lowest article number 17627, highest article number 17704

Article number is a local 'thing' to each news-server's database of
articles - the same article on different servers will almost certianly
have different article numbers - if you can see the Xref header from each
server, it will show the article number of that article.

The number of articles downloaded by your newsreader in that group from
each server, will depend on which article numbers it thinks it already has
from that server (and of course on what the server actually has at that
moment).

--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~

On 2009-11-11, ~BD~ <BoaterDave'remove'@hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
> Whiskers wrote:
>> On 2009-11-11, ~BD~ <BoaterDave'remove'@hotmail.co.uk> wrote:

[...]

>> The number of articles downloaded by your newsreader in that group from
>> each server, will depend on which article numbers it thinks it already has
>> from that server (and of course on what the server actually has at that
>> moment).
>>
>
> I've left my reply to you until last so that you will recognise that I
> have thought much about what you have said, Whiskers.
>
> I really appreciate the time and trouble you and other folk have taken
> to try to help me better understand such matters.
>
> Thank you.

You're welcome ) Good questions deserve good answers. I think.

> I'm still left wondering why there is one real server and one 'alias'!

Only Microsoft can tell you exactly what their set-up is, and why. It may
be that the two addresses go to 'mirrors' so that if/when one fails they
have some chance of maintaining service and restoring the broken one
without anyone noticing; or it may be that they maintain an 'old' address
for the convenience of those users who might get confused by having to
reconfigure their software. The guessing game could go on a long time
without resolution )

--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~

~BD~ wrote:

> I'm still left wondering why there is one real server and one 'alias'!

As a data point; once upon a time EL earthlink maintained its own news
server (farms); and it enjoyed 'experimenting' from time to time with
an experimental news server. It also wanted to distribute the
newsserver load between server farms on the east and west coast of the
US. Consequently it had a news.west.earthlink.net and a
news.eastt.earthlink.net and a demonews.mindspring.com and later it had
nntp.earthlink.net and sometime in there it might have had
news.earthlink.net.

All of those addresses news.west, news.east and demonews all led to
different IP addresses at one time.

EL wasn't particularly good at maintaining newsservers, and it became
progressively more incompetent at that task as the difficulty of
maintaining both the difficult demands of text newsgroups and the even
more difficult demands of lots and lots more binary newsgroups and their
size and volume grew into the petabytes.

This problem grew by leaps and bounds as EL evolved from a dialup
provider into a broadband provider with lots and lots of clients who
expected to be able to get and upload as many binary files as could be
handled by broadband connectivity -- the binary hogs.

Consequently, EL's news administration rapidly evolved into total
incompetence -- but corporate EL wanted to still provide news to its
customers -- so EL gave up on its own news administration and changed
over to outsourcing its news to Supernews, and was thus a big corporate
client to supernews, which had quite a number of other corporate
clients.

Then, along came giganews and bought out supernews corporate client news
serving.

Consequent to all of what I've described above, all of these things are
now true, but they weren't true in the past:

news.west.earthlink.net = 216.168.3.70
news.east.earthlink.net = 216.168.3.70
nntp.earthlink.net = 216.168.3.70
demonews.mindspring.com = 216.168.3.70

If you ask for nameservice for those 4 names, it will say that the
/cname/ is earthlink.vsrv-sjc.supernews.net and the other names are
/aliases/, and while 216.168.3.70 rDNS earthlink.us.supernews.com - yet
another name not a cname or alias.

Not only that.

Supernews (Critical Path) doesn't (really) own that IP address where
those names land any more, altho' it appears that it does, because there
is still such a thing as the 'corporate account supernews' which
(actually) belongs to giganews.

whois -h whois.arin.net 216.168.3.70 ...
OrgName: SuperNews
OrgID: CRITI-7
NetRange: 216.168.0.0 - 216.168.31.255
CIDR: 216.168.0.0/19
NetName: ASN-NET-SUPERNEWS

.... instead, if you use any of those earthlink news names that still
work, one reaches the giganews server, who now administers the news for
all of those who were previously supernews.

Initiating server query ...
Looking up IP address for domain: news.west.earthlink.net
The IP address for the domain is: 216.168.3.70
Connecting to the server on remote port: 119
[Connected] The server greeted our connection with this message:
200 News.GigaNews.Com
Query complete.

It is my understanding that btinternet or whatever it is calling itself
these days also uses giganews. I haven't been able to access it because
I can't think of the right name.



--
Mike Easter

Careful wrote:
> "Whiskers" <> wrote in message
> news:...
>> On 2009-11-11, ~BD~ <BoaterDave'remove'@hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
>>> Whiskers wrote:
>>>> On 2009-11-11, ~BD~ <BoaterDave'remove'@hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
>> [...]
>>
>>>> The number of articles downloaded by your newsreader in that group from
>>>> each server, will depend on which article numbers it thinks it already
>>>> has
>>>> from that server (and of course on what the server actually has at that
>>>> moment).
>>>>
>>> I've left my reply to you until last so that you will recognise that I
>>> have thought much about what you have said, Whiskers.
>>>
>>> I really appreciate the time and trouble you and other folk have taken
>>> to try to help me better understand such matters.
>>>
>>> Thank you.
>> You're welcome ) Good questions deserve good answers. I think.
>>
>>> I'm still left wondering why there is one real server and one 'alias'!
>> Only Microsoft can tell you exactly what their set-up is, and why. It may
>> be that the two addresses go to 'mirrors' so that if/when one fails they
>> have some chance of maintaining service and restoring the broken one
>> without anyone noticing; or it may be that they maintain an 'old' address
>> for the convenience of those users who might get confused by having to
>> reconfigure their software. The guessing game could go on a long time
>> without resolution )
>>
>> --
>> -- ^^^^^^^^^^
>> -- Whiskers
>> -- ~~~~~~~~~~
>>
>
> And that was a good answer, but Dave isn't telling you everything.
> He thinks it's a conspiracy and he is being excluded. He has rolled
> into the realms of borderline libel and deformation of named individuals.
> Dave needs to ease up and let go.
> Are you reading Dave, they are both MS news servers, one is not
> "forged" as you have said in other groups. The two individuals you
> "suspect" are not running a fake microsoft nntp server, now ease up Dave.
>
Heh...as far as he knows anyway.

<snicker>


--
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S39MhPrLQz4

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~BD~
From: ~BD~ <""BoaterDave\"@">

Your From has too much punctuation in it, because you fed the
configuration of your news client too much punctuation which causes
confusion in the attribution. I would assume that SeaMonkey Mac would
be configured pretty much like everything else. If you want your handle
to be tilde BD tilde then you put that into the Name, which is working
out fine.

But, if you want your address to be some variation of
(which I don't recommend) then you should
just put what I typed into the email address section and not try to
punctuate it with additional quotes or other characters which are
illegal in email addresses. The quotes and 'spurious'/extra @ and
backslash are not allowed.

The process of putting your handle and address into the From is going to
add quotes around your handle and brackets around your address, which is
going to make a mess if you excessively punctuate and use illegal
characters.

If you introduce spurious punctuation, then undesirable effects will
result because the process of your message being handled first by the
newsserver and then by the attribution process for various kinds of news
clients will result in 'too much punctuation' such as quotes which fouls
up the attribution line for those clients which are configured to put
your handle and your address.

> 'news.btinternet.com'

Yesterday news.btinternet.com wouldn't resolve for me when I was
checking it for about 15 minutes. Today it resolves to a European
giganews IP.

> From: "Peter Foldes" <>

> Guess you are wondering what happened to some of your posts here.
Guess
> what. I will keep that a secret . But I guess you have a feeling for
the
> answer. You are welcome

Realize that PF lies and also sometimes tells the truth - which means
that you can't believe him, and you shouldn't believe him because...
Realize that PF takes great delight in pulling your chain because you
are built for having your chain pulled.

That being said, there's this about cancels....

Different newsservers handle such control messages as cancels
differently. Some newsservers propagate cancels but don't honor them,
some don't honor and don't propagate, some honor and propagate both, and
some handle cancels 'variably' because they also have a special header
called a Cancel-Lock.

Given that the MS servers are poorly admin/ed, it would not surprise me
if the server honored cancels and permitted promiscuous or rogue
cancels, but I have never tested it in any of the MS groups on the MS
servers.

Under the proper conditions of a loose newsserver, anyone could cancel
anyone else's posts. I don't know if the MS server will or not.


--
Mike Easter

~BD~ wrote:
> Mike Easter wrote:
>> ~BD~
>> From: ~BD~ <""BoaterDave\"@">
>>
>> Your From has too much punctuation in it, because you fed the
>> configuration of your news client too much punctuation which causes
>> confusion in the attribution. I would assume that SeaMonkey Mac would
>> be configured pretty much like everything else. If you want your handle
>> to be tilde BD tilde then you put that into the Name, which is working
>> out fine.
>
> Just where did you see that From: address Mike?

From the post by you in this thread:

Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:30:33 +0000
From: ~BD~ <""BoaterDave\"@">
Subject: Re: Sweating the small stuff! Today's conundrum - IP address
resolution.
Message-ID: <>

GG snurl http://snipr.com/t7hea

Subsequently posts from your Tbird instead of SeaMonkey aren't
configured like that.


--
Mike Easter