-=> On 03-16-19 11:23, mark lewis wrote to Tony Langdon <=-

 ml> yup, depending on the typo, makenl or another nodelist processor might
 ml> have found it... we've all seen what happens when a broken segment gets
 ml> included and entire nets and regions are dropped out of the nodelist...

MakeNL didn't find it.  It was only when I added the DNS stuff that I
discovered the nodelist formatting issue.

 TL> when I started generating DNS RRs for it, and finding that half of the
 TL> entries didn't convert.

 ml> i can't say that i've run into that in a similar situation where i was
 ml> generating f.n.z.my.domain stuff for my old emailFTN gating stuff
 ml> but i did have to really work on my regexes ;)

Yes, handy to know! :D

 ml> makenl and similar nodelist processors are supposed to be used to
 ml> validate the format... humans have been checking the content... that's
 ml> been SOP for eons...

Didn't work in my situation.  MakeNL doesn't pick up stuff that breaks the rest
of the chain, so it has to be 100% human checked now on my net.

 ml> very true... the problem would come when bots spew proper format
 ml> garbage into the list which a human then has to remove before
 ml> processing with makenl...

What are the odds of that - a bot getting in then somehow generating valid
data?  And that's after getting past a login.

 ml>> how do you know if/when invalid data gets in? i'm speaking of data
 ml>> that passes the tests but is still invalid/incorrect...

 TL> ATM, it's a one man show, so same way you do - manually. ;)

 ml> i freely admit that it was a long time before i looked at makenl and
 ml> implemented it in my setup... i was doing the whole thing manually
 ml> before then... manually editing the segment and then manually attaching
 ml> it to a netmail to my upstream coordinator... when i added makenl,
 ml> things got a lot easier but one still has to manually edit the segment
 ml> in a plain ASCII text editor... edlin was used over here for a long
 ml> time OB-)

Yeah, even though MakeNL is technically overkill, I use it and consider it a
usefull tool in the chain to do some of the "donkey work" of processing the
nodelist.

 ml> these days, the nets in my region send their segments in, makenl finds
 ml> them in the inbound and moves them when the testing function is
 ml> executed... if the testing and manual review passes, the NCs are
 ml> notified that their segment has been processed and accepted when the
 ml> process function is executed... makenl generates the file attach
 ml> netmail and puts it in the netmail directory where the mail tosser then
 ml> processes it and exports it so the mailer can handle it...

Which is as things should be.  Again, these parts are not needed here, since
all of my nodelist is managed in the one place.  I don't have the more complex
structure of Fidonet, and doubt I ever will.

 ml> i'm not saying that makenl will catch everything, though... there are
 ml> only a few required fields so at least X number of commas are
 ml> required... however, the last comma separated fields are not mandatory
 ml> so they may be missed... i've seen flags joined into one because a
 ml> comma was missed and that's where the human comes into play but it is
 ml> easy for those to be missed, too... it isn't perfect and the format
 ml> could stand some updating so the flag fields are denoted in a better
 ml> manner but that would break a lot of existing software so we keep on
 ml> doing what it takes to make things work...

Has been a while, but I think my issue was something to do with how the
hostnames were saved in the nodelist.  MakeNL was happy with it, but the script
used for the DNS is a lot stricter than MakeNL or the nodelist.


... Patriotism is not who can leak the most Secret documents to the NY Times...
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