Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!amdcad!dgcad!proa.sv.dg.com!gary From: gary@proa.sv.dg.com (Gary Bridgewater) Newsgroups: news.software.nntp Subject: Re: Can nntp handle a hierarchy of spools? Message-ID: <1991Feb9.001351.25382@proa.sv.dg.com> Date: 9 Feb 91 00:13:51 GMT References: <50331@olivea.atc.olivetti.com> Organization: Data General SDD, Sunnyvale, CA Lines: 31 In article <50331@olivea.atc.olivetti.com> jerry@olivey.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre) writes: >In article richv@hpinddu.cup.hp.com (Rich Van Gaasbeck) writes: >>Scenario C: "Ideal". Start with Scenario A. Take away 100 Meg from >>each machine and give it to a central machine (for a total of 10 >>Gigabytes). Configure the 99 "local" machines to automatically expire > >Another point that would interfear with this scheme is that existing >news transmission does not preserve the article number and current news >readers depend on that. Thus if the user is reading along thru article >98, 99, 100, and article 101 is not available on the local system then >when it goes to to the master system it is possible that article 100 will >be the same as article 98 and article 105 is what was intended. This is >very evident if one switches from one news server to another. Even if >they start out aligned the cancel messages alone will guarantee that >they gradually drift apart. >... This might be a an application for the broadcast packet technology that is being experimented with by the tcp/ip folks. Have multiple NNTP server systems with each one having some portion of the hierarchy. As the news is fed in, it is sent out on the net and the appropriate server wakes up and stores it locally. Cross-posted articles across servers would just get saved more than once but that could possibly be worked around ( or maybe that is a feature). When the user reads news, broadcast packets for the groups of interest are sent out and the server(s) responsible would respond. The client nntp would then pick a server (if more than one responded) and make a "conventional" connection to transfer the goups. In fact, if such redundancy were designed in, I expect a lot of sites would jump on it. You would never have to worry about losing your ~spool/news partition again. -- Gary Bridgewater, Data General Corporation, Sunnyvale California gary@sv.dg.com or {amdahl,aeras,amdcad}!dgcad!gary C++ - it's the right thing to do.