Thursday, August 21, 2008

TECKNEWS - Usenet Suffering From Giantism

"Usenet Growth Reveals Need for 64-bit Based Article Numbering"

Excerpt

Giganews, Inc., the world's foremost premium Usenet access provider, announced today that it has observed that several high-volume newsgroups are poised to exceed the article numbering limit of 2,147,483,647, the maximum possible article number as specified in RFC 3977, the most recent standard for the NNTP protocol. The first newsgroup to exceed this limit is anticipated to do so in about 200 days.

According to RFC 3977, newsgroup article numbers must not exceed 2,147,483,647 (about 2.1 billion), the maximum value of a 32-bit signed integer. Section 6 of the RFC specifies that "While servers MUST NOT send article numbers greater than [2,147,483,647], client and server developers are advised to use internal structures and datatypes capable of handling larger values in anticipation of such a change."

And, as the NET grows......

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