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Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!woods
From: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.admin
Subject: Re: Backup news server.
Message-ID: <4045@ncar.ucar.edu>
Date: 21 Aug 89 23:09:13 GMT
References: <9433@cs.Buffalo.EDU> <9460@cs.Buffalo.EDU>
Reply-To: woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods)
Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 19

In article <9460@cs.Buffalo.EDU> pjg@urth.cc.buffalo.edu (Paul Graham) writes:
>I want to have two (or more) machines with
>identical (modulo dates in history) news spools.  

  I do this by setting the backup server up as a normal batch news feed (so 
that the /usr/spool/batch file with article file names is created), but then
I wrote a C program (ftpxmit) which reads the normal batch file and FTP's
the articles directly into /usr/spool/news on the backup server. The active
file is transmitted every time ftpxmit starts up, so that it is always
up to date. My backup server does not allow posting, and since it gets no
real "feed" I don't even need a history file. Aside from the posting 
restriction, this works quite well and preserves article numbers for
.newsrc files. The backup server is, of course, set up as an NNTP server
even though the NNTP server is not used for news transmission, because it
is used for remote news reading.
  "expire" on the backup server is even simpler: I just run find(1) and
delete anything over two weeks old in /usr/spool/news.

--Greg