[leafnode-list] [PATCH] Random initial delay for fetchnews

[Samuel Tardieu]

Hi.

François Pétillon, in charge of the biggest French news server
news.proxad.net, asked me to wait for a random delay before connecting
to his new server. As many people, I used

  */5 * * * * /usr/sbin/fetchnews

in a crontab entry, and as many others do that and as we are almost
all synchronized using NTP, we were slammering the NNTP server exactly
on square times.

I've added a "-i seconds" option to fetchnews, which waits for up-to
"seconds" seconds before trying to connect to upstream servers. Now,
my crontab entry reads:

  */5 * * * * /usr/sbin/fetchnews -i 60

which adds a random initial delay between 0 and 60 seconds.

The patch is against leafnode 2.0.0_alpha20060321, the one found in
Gentoo, but is so small that it will probably apply to later versions
without difficulty.

Patch attached. The corresponding ChangeLog entry is:

2006-07-20  Samuel Tardieu  <sam at rfc1149.net>

  * Add -i option to fetchnews to allow for an initial delay before
    connecting to upstream servers. This prevents multiple leafnode
    clients from slamming a server on square hours for example by
    randomly differing their connections. Feature suggested by
    François Pétillon.

  Sam

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