Re: xnews error "bits index out of range"

Mike Dee <emteedee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
curt@xxxxxxxx (Curt Welch) wrote:

Subject: Re: xnews error "bits index out of range"
From: curt@xxxxxxxx (Curt Welch)
Newsgroups: news.software.readers
User-Agent: NewsReader.Com

Mike Dee <emteedee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
pianotech <john@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

WhatsJust today I started getting the xnews error message "bits
index out of range" when trying to log on to
alt.binaries.boneless. Does anyone know why or what can be done
about it.

What happens if you (right-click group name) choose Open Special
and DL x number of headers? Have you tried "Catch up" (F8), also?

Works for me as a rule.

BTW I get two similar NG names when searching on "boneless"

alt.binairies.boneless
alt.binaires.boneless

But no alt.binaries.boneless

Which may only mean my bins server (astraweb) doesn't carry that
NG that you've mentioned. The first one I see
<alt.binairies.boneless> has about 30,000 headers available, the
second one that I see (binaires) is almost empty.

Try "binairies".

alt.binaries.boneless is the correct name no doubt. It's the
single largest group on Usenet and it's the first one to hit the
2^31-1 article number limit. It went over the limit just in the
past few weeks on Giganews (and other servers).

Giganews published some warnings about this problem some time
ago...

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

The NNTP rfcs specify that article numbers are 31 bits (positive
signed 32 bit numbers) but Giganews went ahead and designed their
server to use 64 bit article numbers and now the boneless group
has finally gone over the 31 bit limit - breaking many newsreaders
(I don't have a clue how many). Any newsreader that can uses
unsigned 32 bit numbers will still work for some time but will
have to upgrade to 64 bits at some point.

Most likely, all the servers on Usenet are going to migrate to 64
bit articles (we are) so if you want to read
alt.binaries.boneless, you will need to get your newsreader
upgraded to support 64 bit. Either that, or just stop trying to
read boneless. I'm not really sure why anyone would read that
group anyway since it's a random binary dump group used mostly by
people who get their post information using external indexes like
FTD or nzb files. The group gets on average something like 40
articles per second. It's the highest volume group on Usenet by
far.

If Astraweb is not carrying it anymore, it's because they removed
as their short term solution to the 64 bit article number problem
I guess.

Thanks for the post, Curt. Good info.

My ISP gets its bin feed from Astraweb, so I guess I get a "pre-
selected choice" of what Astraweb has to offer :-(

I don't have control over that part of it - if I am missing out on
potential binaries groups (and it looks like this is the case) I don't
get to know about them otherwise. I live in antipodean backwaters so
the pickings are slim ;-)

Yeah, when you run a server that can't cope with the full volume of Usenet,
but you want to get a lot of the binaries, cutting out
alt.binaries.boneless and its associated "friends" is a common trick. I
don't know what the current volume numbers is, but that one group I think
was as high as 10% of all the volume on usenet at one point so you gain a
lot by dropping that single group.

As for 64 bits... when the day comes that I get a 64 bit 'puter and
OS... I might get to understand more about these potential Xnews
shortcomings :-)

It won't require an upgrade to a 64 bit computer for the newsreaders to fix
that. It's trivial to write the code on a 32 bit computer to support 64
bit numbers. All modern languages have built in support for 64 bit
numbers. The bitch is simply that someone has to take the time to check
and change the code, and release the new version. And if the 32 bit numbers
ended up in data files created by the newsreader, it might also require
writing code to convert the 32 bit based data files to 64 bit data files.

BTW, the next largest group is alt.binaries.nl and it's only half way to
the 2^31 bit limit so it's still got some time before it will become a
problem (years maybe?). It's hard to say without better data because of
the complex exponential growth behavior of the groups. Maybe it's only
months?

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

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