Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!texbell!sugar!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: news.misc Subject: Re: Distributed Filesystems vs. NNTP at large sites. Message-ID: <6307@ficc.uu.net> Date: 26 Sep 89 11:21:40 GMT References: <17735@looking.on.ca> <1989Sep20.060201.4473@rpi.edu>Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 33 I said: > Why aren't there more people using remote file systems > of one sort or another? [to read news] In article , wesommer@athena.mit.edu (William Sommerfeld) writes: > Because some sites don't trust client kernels to be secure. This is an administrative problem, then... you don't trust the folks on your client workstations to not have hacked them? > 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). I'm having a bit of a problem with your terminology here. You're saying that you have to give each site a copy, no? Under OpenNET at Ferranti, at least, there is only one copy of the news databases. Administratively all the systems are treated as a single lump. At a commercial site, at least, it's a lot less of a headache. I guess things might be different in academia. It kind of reduces the value of a distibuted filesystem, though. > [at CMU] 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. That's like how we handle incoming news, but only because we don't want to overload the uucp machine with news unbatching. We actually use 'rexec', a command that executes programs on a remote machine. -- Peter da Silva, *NIX support guy @ Ferranti International Controls Corporation. Biz: peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. Fun: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com. `-_-' "That is not the Usenet tradition, but it's a solidly-entrenched U delusion now." -- brian@ucsd.Edu (Brian Kantor)