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>
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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.
--