Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!yonge.csri.toronto.edu!neat.ai.toronto.edu!lamy
From: lamy@ai.toronto.edu (Jean-Francois Lamy)
Subject: Re: NFS questions
Message-ID: <88Aug21.131920edt.414@neat.ai.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Date: Sun, 21 Aug 88 14:39:13 EDT

We have something like 80 machines in different groups NFS mount a central
news server.  On clients, inews simply validates a few things and mails to the
central server (it could NNTP it, yes).  Pnews has been lobotomized not to
deal with moderated newsgroups, the inews on the server does it.

Our news clients all have this view of the news stuff (we run Sun 2, 3 and 4s)

/local/share/news  (aka /usr/lib/news :-) looks as follows:
 active -> /nfs/news-server/news/lib/active  (/usr/lib/news/active on server)
 inews
 mailpaths -> /nfs/news-server/news/lib/mailpaths   (not used by Pnews/inews)
 newsgroups -> /nfs/news-server/news/lib/newsgroups
 organization

/local/share/rn   (often called /usr/local/lib/news/rn) looks like this:
		  (all machines of a group, regardless of architecture, share
		   this)
 INIT
 Pnews.header
 art.help
 filexp
 makedir
 mbox.saver
 mbox.saver.dateit -> /local/lib/rn/mbox.saver.dateit  (machine dependant code)
 newsnews
 ng.help
 norm.saver
 organization -> /local/share/news/organization
 pager.help
 subs.help

/local/lib/rn (machine dependent code -- each machine sees the appropriate one)
 mbox.saver.dateit

rn and the rest of the programs people invoke directly are in 
/local/bin (each machine sees the appropriate one).

The news server runs a locally grown mailer that can easily be made to collect
all news articles sent in the last n minutes and create a news batch with
them.  That news batch is put in a single "lpd" queue, along with whatever
UUCP batches are waiting to be unpacked.  That way, only one news unbatcher
ever runs at any one time.

We have not found a satisfactory way yet to get NNTP to create, for each
connection, a batch containing all articles not received yet.  The problem
is to deal with many concurrent NNTP transfers with many duplicates without
forking an inews per article to keep the history file up to date...  We can't
afford forking inews like that...

Jean-Francois Lamy               lamy@ai.utoronto.ca, uunet!ai.utoronto.ca!lamy
AI Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4