Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!ox.com!yale!quasi-eli!cs.yale.edu!anselmo-ed
From: anselmo-ed@cs.yale.edu (Ed Anselmo)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: How to switch to a new news server
Message-ID: <1991Jun10.213716.3330@cs.yale.edu>
Date: 10 Jun 91 21:37:16 GMT
References: <1991Jun10.125338.12502@phri.nyu.edu>
Sender: news@cs.yale.edu (Usenet News)
Organization: Yale University, Dept. of Computer Science, New Haven, CT
Lines: 41
In-Reply-To: roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu's message of 10 Jun 91 12: 53:38 GMT
Nntp-Posting-Host: bigbird.cf.cs.yale.edu

We've switched newsreading machines twice since I've been here (two
years).  The first time, we tried to keep articles numbers in sync.
That didn't work.  The last switchover went pretty smoothly.  Here's
how we did it last April (our news reading machine is nntp-only):

1) Run news on the new machine and verify that everything is working.
Don't worry about keeping things in sync.

2) Announce the switchover, and announce that news will be unavailable
for a while.

3) Shut down news on the old machine (kill off nntpd, edit inetd.conf,
whatever it takes).  Shut down mail/news gatewaying.  You don't want
any new articles sneaking in there.

3.5) make sure that news and nntp is disabled on the new machine too.

4) Move the active file from the old machine to the new machine.  If
the new machine is acquiring the old machine's name, now is probably as
good a time as any to reconfigure the new machine.

5) get rid of any existing articles on the new machine.

6) dump the old spool partition and restore onto the new machine.

6.5) if you have to reconfigure rrn on the client machines, this would
be a good time to do that (while waiting for restore to complete).

7) run $NEWSBIN/expire/mkhistory or expire -h -r or whatever is
appropriate, and build a new history file.

8) Start up nntp again.  You should be back in business.

This took us the better part of a day to accomplish, most of it spent
waiting for dumps and restores and mkhistory to complete.  No
complaints from users, except for the inevitable "Why can't I read
news right now?".

	-- Ed
-- 
Ed Anselmo   anselmo-ed@cs.yale.edu   {harvard,cmcl2}!yale!anselmo-ed