Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!spool.mu.edu!agate!forney.berkeley.edu!jbuck
From: jbuck@forney.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: How to switch to a new news server
Message-ID: <1991Jun10.210430.19780@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 10 Jun 91 21:04:30 GMT
Article-I.D.: agate.1991Jun10.210430.19780
References: <1991Jun10.125338.12502@phri.nyu.edu>
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator)
Reply-To: jbuck@forney.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 37

In article <1991Jun10.125338.12502@phri.nyu.edu>, roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:
|> 	Our main news machine is currently a vax which is going to be
|> decommisioned soon so we want to switch news to a sun server.  We're
|> running C-news and nntp.  People on the vax read news with rn, and those on
|> suns read it with rrn.  After the switch, we want people on the vax to
|> start using rrn too.  We want to have both systems running for a while to
|> make sure the new one is working right before we turn off news on our vax.
|> 
|> 	The problem is, we don't want to invalidate everybody's .newsrc
|> file.  Is there any reasonable way to make the article numbers (i.e.
|> contents of the active file) on the new sun news server match those on the
|> old vax news server, and stay in sync?

I know of no way to make the two systems stay in sync, but you could
achieve the transition as follows:

1) Get the people on the vax using rrn even though the server is local
(have them go through rrn anyway).

2) When you know that everyone can use rrn successfully, bring down
both systems, and do

rcp -r vax:/usr/spool/news sun:/usr/spool/news
rcp vax:/usr/lib/news/active sun:/usr/lib/news
rcp vax:/usr/lib/news/history* sun:/usr/lib/news

(plus any other files I've forgotten about).

Now you'll need to fix up the articles you've copied.  You can pass
each article through a sed script that changes any occurence of the
vax hostname in the header to the sun hostname.  You should then be
in business with everyone's .newsrc valid; they would just change
their NNTPSERVER variable.

--
Joe Buck
jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu	 {uunet,ucbvax}!galileo.berkeley.edu!jbuck