Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!sequent!mntgfx!dclemans
From: dclemans@mentor.com (Dave Clemans @ APD x1292)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: What versions of netnews exist for Apollos?
Message-ID: <1989Aug23.154215.165@mentor.com>
Date: 23 Aug 89 15:42:15 GMT
References: <13735@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Organization: engr
Lines: 26

The big problem you see with the news software on Apollos (provided you
set it up so that all the Apollo nodes look like one big "pseudo" machine,
which is what most people I've heard of have done) is that the Usenet
software expects standard Unix file locking semantics, that is no locking
at all.  Apollo's enforce exclusive file write access across a network.

We run Cnews as the Usenet "transport" service.  I didn't have any real
problems in bringing the recent release of Cnews up; it's been quite
stable.  Note that if you compile Cnews as a Sys5 program you WANT to
use one of the public domain dbm library emulators; what the Cnews
build script gives you by default to replace the standard dbm libraries
is an extremely slow sequential search.

I have all the "standard" news reading programs up; readnews, vnews,
rn and vn.  To work around the file locking problems they actually read
an "active.copy" file instead of "active".  "active.copy" is updated
from "active" every 15 minutes by a cron job that runs on our mail/news
gateway node.  rn was also modified to not hold the active file continually
open (which would prevent active.copy from being updated from active...)

I tried once to compile nn (under sys5) but it had problems with hanging
after reading one character.  I haven't had time to look at it to see why,
or to try to compile it instead as a bsd program.

Dave Clemans
Mentor Graphics