[Pan-users] It seems we might have reached some sort of milestone…

[SciFi]

Hi,

FYI, I just added the following to “Bug 549655 – Support 64 bit
article numbers”:

We should note on this bug:

Apparently sometime late on Tuesday 21 April 2009 CDT (UTC -0500),
some people using Xnews began suddenly logging strange errors
showing “bits index out of range” and asking for help in the
‘news.software.readers’ group.

Turns out they were trying to access ‘alt.binaries.boneless’ which
of course is the largest group by far.  And they were using
GigaNews.

Yep, you guessed it:  GN and other servers have finally went over
the 31–bit limit for article numbers.  ;)  [RFC-3977 sets this
limit, while older related RFCs had no published limit AFAIK,
go figure…]

The discussion starts here with tpka ‘pianotech’ getting the
error:  <news:address@hidden>

Later in that thread, on Thursday 23 April, tpka ‘Guy’ was
watching his newsrc counter for boneless.  By 3:50pm CDT, it
tripped over the limit (not sure what server he was using at the
time).

Later that same date (night-time 23 April CDT), an Astraweb user
posted a confirmation there.

Then the discussion touched on how some UseNet–providers are
simply effective clones of the major ones.  Which means this
problem has already begun spreading all over creation.  ;)

Most people are aware of boneless and do not try to load/sync
headers; instead, keen usenetters will resort to NZB indexing
sites, or FTD or such, to try locating what–not, which all operate
on the “Message-ID” gizmo.

But one does not need to actually load any headers from boneless
to experience this problem:  As soon as you open boneless in your
news–reader, the NNTP dialog will try reading the “high–water
mark” for the group, which is over the 31–bit limit.  *Boom* right
there your software might experience an error if it hasn’t been
patched yet.

There probably are several areas in the code for any news–reader
that need patching, as you can see in the attachment for this very
bug for pan2.  The “open group” code is just one place.

So this to me seems to be an historical moment.  :)

And it is a bit uncanny that GN did predict it occurring within a
rough time-frame (re: article published at the URL mentioned at
the top of this bug–report[1]).

It seems the next–biggest group is ‘alt.binaries.nl’ which has
lots of room, but who really knows what will happen in the future…


[1] http://www.giganews.com/news/article/64-bit-Usenet.html