[nos-bbs] Bulletin flood handling

[Michael E Fox - N6MEF]

O.K.  Understood.

Of course, the problem with lumping different floods into a single
topic-oriented bulletin area (as it seems many/most? *NOS folks do), is that
it basically ignores the flood designator.  

For a simplistic example, I'll use the USA since I'm not familiar with
regional flood designators elsewhere.  And I'll limit the example to three
flood designators:  @nca (Northern California), @usa, @ww

For simplicity, let's say I have a three forwarding partners:
-- one in Northern California (they should receive anything with floods:
@nca, @usa, @ww)
-- one somewhere else in the USA (they should receive anything with floods:
@usa, @ww)
-- one somewhere else in the world (they should receive anything with flood:
@ww)

And let's say my rewrite file contains:

topic@*	topic

That means that bulletins addressed to "topic" and "topic at nca" and
"topic at usa" and "topic at ww" will all appear in the bulletin area "topic".
That's great for my users because they get things sorted into topic areas
and because all of the above floods apply to my users.

But if I forward the "topic" area to others, then I create the following
problems:
-- everyone gets a copy of bulletins addressed to "topic", even though they
are only intended for the local machine
-- everyone gets a copy of bulletins addressed to "topic at nca", even though
they are only intended for NorCal machines
-- everyone gets a copy of bulletins addressed to 'topic at usa", even though
they are only intended for USA machines.

Therefore, there is "leakage" of bulletins outside their intended flood
areas.  And if my forwarding partners follow the same approach, then all
bulletins for "topic" end up being flooded as if they were addressed to
"topic at ww"!

Bob Tenty did say he organized bulletins by flood, not by topic, so that
wouldn't create (or propagate) this problem.  But, from what I can tell,
sorting by topic and ignoring the flood designator seems to be what a lot of
*NOS folks are doing.

Michael
N6MEF


-----Original Message-----
From: nos-bbs-bounces at tapr.org [mailto:nos-bbs-bounces at tapr.org] On Behalf
Of Gustavo Ponza
Sent: Sunday, August 10, 2014 3:09 AM
To: TAPR xNOS Mailing List
Subject: Re: [nos-bbs] Bulletin flood handling

On Sat, 2014-08-09 at 23:20 -0700, Michael E Fox - N6MEF wrote:
> Thanks Gustavo.
> 
> So, to clarify:
> 
> Looking at the rewrite example, a bulletin addressed to "packet at ww" would
end up in the packet area.  So would a bulletin addressed to just "packet". 

Yes, but it needs to remap the 'To:' field with the '@distribution'
field to comply (only and in the case of) to the AX.25 packet
forwarding.

> Therefore, if you forward the "packet" area to others, you're forwarding a
mixture of bulletins with floods plus bulletins without floods.  Is that
what you're doing?

Yes, per-area forwarding is purely intended to forward the
*container* (area), so the 'mixture of bulletins' which the
SysOp decided to put in it.

In particular/limited cases can be used the AX.25 '@distribution'
name to specify an 'area' name related, so per example:

whatever at ita ita
whatever at usa usa
whatever at ww  ww 

etc. ... but, in the actual JNOS situation there are no other
ways for doing better.


73 gus