Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!bloom-beacon!wesommer From: wesommer@athena.mit.edu (William Sommerfeld) Newsgroups: news.misc Subject: Distributed Filesystems vs. NNTP at large sites. Message-ID:Date: 25 Sep 89 18:46:28 GMT References: <17735@looking.on.ca> <1989Sep20.060201.4473@rpi.edu> <45814@bbn.COM> <155@ora.ora.com> <6270@ficc.uu.net> Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Organization: /mit/wesommer/.organization Lines: 18 In-reply-to: peter@ficc.uu.net's message of 24 Sep 89 16:49:53 GMT Why aren't there more people using remote file systems of one sort or another? Because some sites don't trust client kernels to be secure. The critical thing is the invariants which have to be maintained across the various news databases (/usr/spool/news/*, and the history and active files). Reading news across a distributed filesystem isn't a problem; posting is, because the posting site has to be trusted to correctly maintain the invariants. The site andrew.cmu.edu is using software known as the "andrew message system", where reading is done over the Andrew distributed filesystem; however, posting is done by inserting the article into an append-only queue directory which is periodically scanned by a daemon which does have write access to the news databases. --