Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bob
From: bob@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Organization of news binaries/data files wrt NFS
Message-ID: <16342@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 25 Jun 88 06:55:13 GMT
References: <2320@quacky.mips.COM> <147@ists>
Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer & Information Science
Lines: 45

(Sorry if this discussion has become old - I'm trying to catch up on a
few groups that I've let lie unread for a few days.)

In article <147@ists> shields@ists.yorku.ca (Paul Shields) writes:
>In article <2320@quacky.mips.COM>, dce@mips.COM (David Elliott) writes:
>> We are in the process of implementing a shared news system for our
>> in-house systems using NFS.  We have one machine we use for the
>> news server, the news binary/data disk server, and we want it to be
>> the only machine to actually post the news.
>
>We solved this problem on our Suns by installing nntp, which
>obsoletes the LIBDIR stuff on the clients.  If you have tcp/ip you
>can do it, and it prevents a lot of headaches.

We have melded the two approaches: We NFS-mount /usr/spool/news and
/usr/lib/news from a central server (a Pyramid 98x).
/usr/lib/news/inews on each machine is a symbolic link to a private
/usr/lib/newsbin/inews, which is either a local inews (on that Pyramid
only), or an NNTP "fake inews" (on all the clients).  This way, the
server is the only machine to actually post the news.  Also,
/usr/lib/news/rn is a symbolic link to the directory
/usr/lib/newsbin/rn, which contains all of rn's support shell scripts
and help files.  It turns out that inews and the rn directory are the
only machine-private things that needed to be linked to something
outside of /usr/lib/news for individual machines.

The main reason we needed to use NFS-mounted filesystems for reading
is because we have a few private newsgroups (e.g. for tenure-track
faculty) that are kept private by normal file mode protection
mechanisms and Yellow Pages distribution of the group file.  We read
news using all sorts of user front-ends, none of which need to know
that they live in any sort of special world, like they would if we had
to graft NNTP client code into them.

The reason we needed to use an NNTP inews for posting was to avoid
lock conflicts on the active and history files.

A secondary reason why I personally prefer to use NFS to read news is
because it's actually faster than using the NNTP protocol.  I have run
a "local" rn and a NNTP rrn side-by-side and rn comes up observably
better in user responsiveness and feel.
-- 
 Bob Sutterfield, Department of Computer and Information Science
 The Ohio State University; 2036 Neil Ave. Columbus OH USA 43210-1277
 bob@cis.ohio-state.edu or ...!{att,pyramid,killer}!cis.ohio-state.edu!bob