Xref: utzoo news.software.nntp:1122 news.software.b:6878 Path: utzoo!utstat!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!rufus!rufus.almaden.ibm.com!kurt From: kurt@rufus.almaden.ibm.com (Kurt Shoens) Newsgroups: news.software.nntp,news.software.b Subject: Re: Can nntp handle a hierarchy of spools? Message-ID: <514@rufus.UUCP> Date: 12 Feb 91 05:17:12 GMT References: Sender: news@rufus.UUCP Reply-To: shoens@ibm.com Organization: IBM Almaden Research Center Lines: 32 Rich Van Gaasbeck (richv@hpinddu.cup.hp.com) ... Scenario C: "Ideal" ... Change the nntp daemon to list both local information and information from the central machine when asked about active newsgroups, headers, etc. When asked to retrieve an article it would get it from the central server if necessary, give it to the user and also store it in the local spool. This looks similar to the Andrew File System (AFS). Perhaps you could get the same effect by having your clients AFS mount the news spool. AFS will cache recently read files locally on the clients. By such a scheme, one would have only a single news system (that on the server) to administer. You could handle many many news-reading clients by building a central server with lots of disk space to hold all the articles and a number of AFS clients connected to the central server that would each run nntp to handle the news-reading load. The AFS clients would tend to cache articles that had appeared in the last few days .... With respect to expire ... you can easily modify expire to use different criteria for deleting articles. The approximate form is: gather info on all articles one might potentially delete, sort the info by order of desirability, and remove as many of the least desirable articles as you have to to meet some goal (say, a particular amount of free space). Now, if you had a few years of netnews online, it might be useful to reengineer the storage structure of the history file. As it currently stands, the history file has to be read and written completely each time you expire. -- Kurt Shoens