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