Hello folks,
It's quite a while since the last Netnews-related announcement
on the network: and I'm glad to (a bit belated) announce that Tilde.team
is now a fully-functional node in Tildeverse Netnews once again;
fully verified on 2 August 2021, that it provides full post history
in all `tilde.*` newsgroups, matching with other servers in the network.
So, Tilde.team's members who would like to participate in Netnews
directly from Tilde.team's own server, experiment with posting
from shell, SSH tunnel, or reading "offline" from server-local news spool;
you may now do so in confidence.
%<-----
For people who are curious of "why?" On 30 July 2021 [1], there were
two problems discovered on Tilde.team's NNTP server: one was
a de-synchronization due to its changed IP address, which means
other servers couldn't send new posts to it (but new posts made there
would reach other servers normally).
The NNTP link being specified by IP(v4) address was a leftover artifact of
a (successful) experiment to work around INN2's resource leak in its IPv6 newsreader request handling around 13 January 2021 [2]. When Tilde.team subsequently changed its IP address on 12 April 2021 [3],
the inevitable happened. ~tomasino fixed it soon after this was reported [4], and the missing chunks of newer posts sorted themselves.
The second problem however, was the complete absence of posts history
beyond certain date into the past. This originated back to the first days
of current incarnation of Netnews service on Tilde.team. The server
had been set up, networked, and could read and post properly
(to ~ben's credit); but the last step needed in small NNTP networks
like Tildeverse Netnews was filling the server with preexisting posts, otherwise users connected there wouldn't see any posts older
than the day that the server got first connected to its peers.
There are multiple ways to do this; the problem was that back then,
only one approach properly tested on Tildeverse Netnews was the one
I used at Tilde.club [5]. However, this way does not work on Tilde.team
because its NNTP setup has tighter security policy; and no one had
a complete idea how to make other approaches work.
So it got postponed, and... forgotten. (How embarrassing)
Anyway, back to the present; soon after the issue got pointed out,
and I started looking into it, I came across a way to get this
long-postponed task to work out by chance... from a manual of other
USENET software I used as a part of investigation [6]; but this way
of history feed-up has to be initiated from an adjacent server
(Cosmic.voyage) by an administrator there (~tomasino), and Tilde.team's
NNTP server configuration must be adjusted to take them.
After some back and forth with ~tomasino to conduct test run of the process yielded good result [7]; I asked ~khuxkm to apply settings change
on Tilde.team [8], then back to ~tomasino to initiate the full procedure,
which completed successfully. [9]
Finally, I did a full `tilde.*` postings history comparison against Cosmic.voyage (a distribution point in Tildeverse Netnews)
as a re-verification; which they turned out fully matched,
and that concluded the fixup. [10]
%<-----
And on the last note, if anyone spotted problems on Netnews servers here,
don't forget to give some shout on #netnews channel of Tildeverse IRC too (dropping a line to my email also works, but it might not be as fast),
so it could be looked into as soon as the time allows.
Wish you a good old Netnews time,
~xwindows
(Tilde.club's unofficial Netnews wrangler)
P.S. For the record, current Tildeverse Netnews NNTP topology
is as follows:
news.tilde.club/
news.tildeverse.org <-------. ,-------> yourtilde.com
(public gateway) | | (public gateway)
^ v v
| cosmic.voyage
| *A (distribution point)
| ^ ^
| | |
tilde.team <--------------' '-------> baud.baby
(private server)
*A : This path is one-way.
(Servers that are not explicitly denoted private or public here
are open to newsreading requests from the Internet in read-only fashion)
-----
[1] "~team nntp doesn't seem to sync" [2021-07-30T04:05:46Z]
<news:sdvtqq$282fr$
2@tilde.tilde.team>
<nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.team/11>
[2] This happened on Tildeverse IRC's #netnews channel, from
2021-01-13T11:41Z to 2021-01-13T21:22Z.
[3] ~ben announced Tilde.team VM relocation (which also entails IP address
change) in #team channel of Tildeverse IRC on 2021-04-11T19:53Z,
which completed on 2021-04-12T00:20Z.
[4] "Re: ~team nntp doesn't seem to sync" [2021-07-30T09:43:04Z]
<news:
slrnsg7id8.1mvnm.tomasino@cosmic.voyage>
<nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.team/16>
[5] "A copycat recipe for suck-feeding from Tildeverse NNTP newspool"
[2020-09-25T08:58:58Z]
<news:
alpine.LFD.2.23.451.2009251556480.2030507@tilde.club>
<nntp://news.tilde.club/tilde.club/23>
[6] `suck` program is written to accommodate various method of news spool
feed-up: one of them (direct NNTP `IHAVE` push) was the method I used
on Tilde.club [5], but there are many others, including `innfeed`-based
and `innxmit`-based method; last of which was the one I have chosen
to apply in fixing Tilde.team, sans the use of `suck` program itself.
[7] This happened on Tildeverse IRC's #netnews channel, from
2021-08-01T01:27Z to 2021-08-01T12:12Z.
[8] This happened on Tildeverse IRC's #team channel, from
2021-08-02T01:52Z to 2021-08-02T02:26Z.
[9] This happened on Tildeverse IRC's #netnews channel, from
2021-08-02T03:57Z to 2021-08-02T11:29Z.
[10] The completion was announced on Tildeverse IRC's #team channel
on 2021-08-02T11:33Z.
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113