Xref: utzoo news.software.nntp:1102 news.software.b:6850 Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!uunet!olivea!olivey!jerry From: jerry@olivey.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre) Newsgroups: news.software.nntp,news.software.b Subject: Re: Can nntp handle a hierarchy of spools? Message-ID: <50331@olivea.atc.olivetti.com> Date: 7 Feb 91 23:59:16 GMT References: Sender: news@olivea.atc.olivetti.com Followup-To: news.software.nntp Organization: Olivetti ATC; Cupertino, CA Lines: 43 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. I have considered writing an "nntpslave" that would function like nntpxfer but instead of processing the article thru rnews it would just store it in the appropriate place in the news spool partition. (The "Xref" line would come in handy for cross posted articles.) Given that plus a copy of the master system's active and history files one would have a slave server that could be used transparently with the master or other slaves. But that does not, by itself, eliminate the duplicate storage. One could split the storage and servers by news groups with one system handling alt, another handling comp, etc. There was a version of the "vn" news reader that was set up to do that. It would switch NNTP servers based on the group being read. That would distribute the load and the storage among many systems. Presumably a master system would deal with the external world and redistribute to the partial slave systems. If one was really spread out across time zones, such as America and Europe, then I would strongly recomend different servers for each geographical area. As you say there would never be a good time to take the system down and then there is the question of transmitting the article every time someone reads it rather than once. If the only problem is to handle reading by a large number of local users then there are specialized servers that can handle very large amounts of NFS and disk traffic. Jerry Aguirre