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From: molenda@s1.msi.umn.edu (Jason Molenda)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: C News, NFS and mixed CPUs: working
Message-ID: <1991Mar16.164121.2575@s1.msi.umn.edu>
Date: 16 Mar 91 16:41:21 GMT
References: <27DFD553.5FB9@tct.uucp>
Organization: Minnesota Supercomputer Institute
Lines: 34

I thought I'd describe my experiences getting Cnews to work in
our networked environment.. It wasn't any near as hard as what
Chip's sounded like. :)

We have a setup of Sun-3/Sun-4/SGI Iris machines.  We have NFS
exporting all of the directories so that the disk layout will
"look" the same no matter which machine you happen to be on.
This obviously simplified my problem quite a bit.

Since Cnews was running on one of our Sun-3 server machines
and it did all of the news processing, the only thing we
really had to deal with was users posting news from the
other-architecture machines.

Inews seems to want to run some binaries and I was too lazy to
sit down and figure out which it wanted to run and recompile
Cnews for every weird architecture machine we happend to have,
so I added the following lines to inews near the top:


if test  `/bin/arch` != 'sun3'; then
   /usr/ucb/rsh s0.msi /usr/local/share/lib/newsbin/inject/inews $*
   exit 0  # this should be whatever rsh returns but I can't remember how to do
           # that in sh right now.
fi

(okay, so I never got around to fixing that exit call... hey, it _works_ :-)

So it would just transfer the load to our news processing machine.
It avoided the problem of multiple binaries altogether and has worked
great ever since.
-- 
Jason Molenda, Tech Support, Iris & News Admin, Minnesota Supercomputer Inst
molenda@msi.umn.edu || "You can tune a piano but you can't tuna fish."