Subj : Re: Join DiscipleNet
To   : All
From : Gary McCulloch
Date : Thu Oct 08 2026 07:52 pm

Wilfred,

You were right and I was wrong, so let me deal with that first.

Ten nodes plus three administrative entries is thirteen. You took the
nodelist off my own website, which is the correct place to take it
from, and it was the current one. My post said your scan was hitting
stale or unrelated entries. That was not true, and I should have
checked before I wrote it rather than after. I have no complaint about
the test.

WHAT WAS ACTUALLY BROKEN

12:1/0 and 12:12/0 answering "No such AKA" was a real fault and it was
mine. My nodelist advertised the Zone and Region entries at
call.rofbbs.com:24556 and my hub held only the Host address. I checked
the other four networks before replying and the same fault was in all
of them - ten addresses advertising an endpoint I did not hold.

That is fixed. The hub now holds all sixteen and announces them in the
session greeting. Same for a second fault you did not see: thirty-one
of my nodes were subscribed to no nodelist file base at all, so the
weekly hatch had never sent them a nodelist. On DiscipleNet that was
four of the nine. Fixed as well, in time for tomorrow's run.

THE UNSECURED SESSION, AND MARK'S QUESTION

You are right that this needed declaring, and I had no business
calling it correct without saying why.

My hub accepts sessions only from systems listed in its own nodelist.
Applications do not arrive by netmail here - they come through a web
form at rofbbs.com/rofftn/application.php - so the hub never needs to
take a session from a system it does not already know, and I would
rather it did not. Mark, that is the answer to yours: a new sysop does
not have to netmail me, and does not have to get past the hub to
apply.

What was missing is that the nodelist said none of this. IBN:24556
promises binkp and says nothing about who may call, so your scan was
right to read the refusal as a fault rather than as policy. The flag
for it already exists - LO, "accepts calls Only from Listed
addresses", FTS-5001 section A - and twenty-five nodes in the Zone 1
nodelist carry it. Mine carried it nowhere. It is now on all fifteen
hub entries across the five networks and ships in tomorrow's lists.

WHAT IS STILL WRONG

Several member entries advertise IBN and do not answer one. Those
systems are moving mail - they poll me rather than accept calls - so
the boards are fine and my nodelist is the thing that overstates them.
I am sampling each of them daily for a week rather than acting on one
probe, and then correcting the flags for the ones that are genuinely
poll-only. That is my data to fix, not theirs.

So: the list you scanned deserved most of what it got.

One thing that would otherwise confuse the comparison. Tomorrow's
rebuild is still day number 282, because MakeNL names its output for
the coming Friday and that is tomorrow - same filename, different
contents. The header CRC is what tells builds apart. Yours was 36180.
The copy on the website now is 40361, rebuilt this morning for a
couple of entries with a missing _BBS and a location in capitals, and
tomorrow's will differ again for the LO flag. I mention it only so the
filename does not mislead you, not to suggest you tested the wrong
thing - you did not.

If you run the same test against tomorrow's I would genuinely like to
see the output, and I will say so publicly either way.

Thanks for the sweep. It found more in an afternoon than I had found
in a year of looking at it myself.

Gary McCulloch - 1:154/50
ROF FTN - rofbbs.com

 + call.rofbbs.com:6800  call@call.rofbbs.com  423-541-8271  IPv4 & IPv6
 + ACIS Member. AmigaNet ArakNet C=Net DescipleNet FidoNet PiNet RetroNet
--- C-Net/5
 * Origin: Reign of Fire : ROF FTN : ArakNet 2.0 : www.rofbbs.com (1:154/50)

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