Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!bu.edu!wang!fitz From: fitz@wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald) Newsgroups: news.software.nntp Subject: Re: Article number sync between servers Keywords: nntp,admin Message-ID: Date: 13 Apr 91 02:05:13 GMT References: <1991Apr11.113706.27287@relay.nswc.navy.mil> <1991Apr11.174112.26774@ucselx.sdsu.edu> Organization: Wang Labs, Lowell MA, USA Lines: 32 > csmoko@relay.nswc.navy.mil (Chuck Smoko - E41) writes: >> We were wondering if there exists >> a way to have backup/multiple news servers. [...] The >> problem, however, is keeping article numbers 'in SYNC' between the >> machines. nash@ucselx.sdsu.edu (Ron Nash) writes: > I believe one way is to set up site A as a master site. Site A gets > all incomming feeds and in turn is the only site to feed site B. Site > B would then get all the articles in the same order that site A gets > them. I don't think it will work. Consider the case where an article shows up at A, then a cancel for it shows up before the article is passed to B. A will have used up a sequence number on the article, but B won't have. Even if you could get around this somehow, by for example not processing cancels or supercedes on A, this sounds pretty fragile. If the 2 machines ever get out of sync, you can't put them back together again. This will happen if B crashes at the wrong time and drops a single article, or one machine's disk fills up, or something like that. It sounds to me like the only solution would be to do it at the filesystem level: make a backup of A's news disk onto B every once in a while. This assumes that you can shut off news processing on A for a while every day so it's frozen, and that you can handle a *massive* network traffic between the 2 machines. You can still read news on A while the backup is going on, but you still can't post on B at all. --- Tom Fitzgerald Wang Labs fitz@wang.com 1-508-967-5278 Lowell MA, USA ...!uunet!wang!fitz