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From: rees@pisa.ifs.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo,news.software.b
Subject: Re: Rn locks active file on Apollos
Keywords: postnews, active locked
Message-ID: <4f8ebb1a.1bc5b@pisa.ifs.umich.edu>
Date: 1 Feb 91 18:04:40 GMT
References: <168@numenor.gtephx.UUCP> <1991Jan31.195615.13448@engin.umich.edu>
Sender: usenet@terminator.cc.umich.edu (usenet news)
Reply-To: rees@citi.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Organization: University of Michigan IFS Project
Lines: 29

In article <1991Jan31.195615.13448@engin.umich.edu>, stealth@engin.umich.edu (Mike Pelletier) writes:

  In article <168@numenor.gtephx.UUCP> yountm@gtephx.UUCP (Marvin Yount) writes:
  >I'm trying to get Rn set up on our Apollo site.  I've got it running
  >pretty well (up to patch 45), but we have noticed a situation regarding
  >the locking of the active file...

  The solution is to forget completely about the Apollo //* filesystem, and
  install C-news and NNTP on an individual Apollo node, and use rn with NNTP
  to access the articles.

That's one way to do it, but it seems a shame to not use the Apollo
distributed file system to read the articles.  Using nntp will put a bigger
load on both clients and servers and slow down your news readers.

What we did at Apollo, and what the Engineering School here did until
recently, was closer to what Willem suggests.  Fix the readers to copy the
active file and work out of the copy.  Fix both readers and inews to retry
on a locked active file.  Unfortunately this is more work than most people
want to do when there is another solution available.

These days people like to pretend that files are never implicitly locked,
and that the whole universe is one big happy Unix file system.  File system
folks (like me) are trying hard to provide this fiction, even though some of
us think it's a little misguided (I happen to like knowing that I've got
exclusive access to a file when I open it for write).

I've still got the code for inews that sets the proper locks on the active
file, and retries on busy.  I'll be happy to send it to anyone who wants it.