since yesterday, I get on eternal-september a lot of sometime very old
posts, for example this one from 2013:

news://news.eternal-september.org:119/51DE36BA.5080505@jgaa.com

not a big deal, but what happen?

(not my server, I don't feed the big8)

also in source:

<krj2c7$mao$1@speranza.aioe.org>
X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com

jdd

jdanield <jdd@dodin.org> wrote:

>since yesterday, I get on eternal-september a lot of sometime very old
>posts,

There is a thread in eternal-september.support discussing this very
issue. The old articles are being re-injected through news.freedyn.de.

The Message-IDs weren't changed so I'm not sure why they re-appeared.

>for example this one from 2013:

>news://news.eternal-september.org:119/51DE36BA.5080505@jgaa.com

>not a big deal, but what happen?

>(not my server, I don't feed the big8)

>also in source:

><krj2c7$mao$1@speranza.aioe.org>
>X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com

"Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com> writes:

> There is a thread in eternal-september.support discussing this very
> issue. The old articles are being re-injected through news.freedyn.de.

> The Message-IDs weren't changed so I'm not sure why they re-appeared.

Highly unlikely that anyone keeps a history database going back to 2013,
so to reject articles that old, Usenet relies on the Date (or
Injection-Date) header. That means that if the reinjector rewrites the
Date header, there's not a lot that one can do.

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

On 1/9/22 10:35 AM, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Highly unlikely that anyone keeps a history database going back
> to 2013, so to reject articles that old, Usenet relies on the Date
> (or Injection-Date) header.

Yep.

> That means that if the reinjector rewrites the Date header, there's
> not a lot that one can do.

Is the poster rewriting the Date header?

Or is this a new news-admin trying to backfill their news server and
accidentally leaking messages to a peer that isn't filtering them like
they should be?

--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

jdanield schrieb:

> not a big deal, but what happen?

news.freedyn.de re-feedet old postings from a backup system to a (new)
live server; probably due to a misconfiguration they were prpagated to
its peers (and mostly dropped due to their age).

Most probably due to another misconfiguration on eternal-september.org
[1] those dupes were not rejected, but accepted, shown to readers and
propagated to peers. [2]

Both admins have been notified; postings should have stopped today at
about 13.40 CET.

Regards,
-thh

[1] Speculating: artcutoff has could have been set to 0 (disabling the
rejection of old postings) to re-feed old postings after a crash or
server migration, and someone forgot to undo that change afterwards.

[2] Starting on Jan 6th at about midnight CET. I peer with both servers
and have - according to my logs - rejected about 1.000 Postings, 137
directly from freedyn.de and 866 from eternal-september.

Russ Allbery schrieb:

> Highly unlikely that anyone keeps a history database going back to 2013,

In low-traffic moderated groups we got postings back to about 2007,
according to the Message-IDs (I don't have the postings).

> so to reject articles that old, Usenet relies on the Date (or
> Injection-Date) header. That means that if the reinjector rewrites the
> Date header, there's not a lot that one can do.

The Date: header has not been rewritten, so INN schould have rejected
those postings (and it has, here).

-thh

On 1/9/22 11:37 AM, Thomas Hochstein wrote:
> The Date: header has not been rewritten, so INN schould have rejected
> those postings (and it has, here).

Thank you for confirmation of the lack of modification and that INN's
default artcutoff should have filtered these.

--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> writes:
> On 1/9/22 10:35 AM, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> That means that if the reinjector rewrites the Date header, there's not
>> a lot that one can do.

> Is the poster rewriting the Date header?

> Or is this a new news-admin trying to backfill their news server and
> accidentally leaking messages to a peer that isn't filtering them like
> they should be?

I would be very, very surprised if eternal-september isn't filtering on
the Date header. (That filtering happens at every hop except for
old-school transit-only servers like Cyclone.)

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

Thomas Hochstein <thh@thh.name> writes:
> Russ Allbery schrieb:

>> Highly unlikely that anyone keeps a history database going back to 2013,

> In low-traffic moderated groups we got postings back to about 2007,
> according to the Message-IDs (I don't have the postings).

Right you keep entries for the articles still in the spool, but no one is
going to keep a record of all the rejected or expired articles for that
long. Normal settings are between 7 and 30 days.

> The Date: header has not been rewritten, so INN schould have rejected
> those postings (and it has, here).

That's very weird, then. Is there an Injection-Date header?

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

Thomas Hochstein <thh@thh.name> writes:

> [1] Speculating: artcutoff has could have been set to 0 (disabling the
> rejection of old postings) to re-feed old postings after a crash or
> server migration, and someone forgot to undo that change afterwards.

Oh, good call, I should have read the whole thread first.

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:
>"Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com> writes:

>>There is a thread in eternal-september.support discussing this very
>>issue. The old articles are being re-injected through news.freedyn.de.

>>The Message-IDs weren't changed so I'm not sure why they re-appeared.

>Highly unlikely that anyone keeps a history database going back to 2013,

Fair enough but some of the articles were from 2020 and 2021.

As I noted elsewhere, the re-injected articles thread due to an intact
References header, so I can walk back or forth in the thread tree if the
other not re-injected articles in the thread weren't expired. It's like
the re-injected articles superseded the unexpired original articles.

>so to reject articles that old, Usenet relies on the Date (or
>Injection-Date) header. That means that if the reinjector rewrites the
>Date header, there's not a lot that one can do.