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Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/17/84 chuqui version 1.7 9/23/84; site nsc.UUCP
Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!nsc!chuqui
From: chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: limiting news to certain hours of the day?
Message-ID: <3019@nsc.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 23-Jul-85 01:07:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: nsc.3019
Posted: Tue Jul 23 01:07:46 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 24-Jul-85 08:15:39 EDT
References: <726@lsuc.UUCP>
Reply-To: chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Organization: The Dreamer Fithp
Lines: 49

In article <726@lsuc.UUCP> dave@lsuc.UUCP (David Sherman) writes:
>Our system is heavily loaded during office hours and can't
>handle the additional load of uuxqt/cunbatch/news-unpack/rnews
>which news feeding causes. However, I don't mind a uucico
>running, and in fact I like to have uucico running, so we
>can get mail in and out of our system during the day.
>
>Mark Brader (lsuc!msb) and I have been playing with a shell
>script which would let us batch incoming news by sending it
>to (say) /usr/spool/newsbatches/* and running the cunbatches
>from there at night. Before we actually try this kind of
>thing, has anyone done it already?

Well, I'm now running a version of uucp that allows me to grade batches --
it should be part of 4.3, and I believe honey-danber does this as well. It
means that news is simply not transmitted around during prime hours. This
has helped things out to a great degree.

If you can't fix uucp, there are still things you can do:

    o Simply don't queue up anything until the evening hours, and have
    your upstream feed (only the main feed has to do it -- I've found that
    even with 8 or 9 local feeds running into my site it doesn't really
    bother things much) do it as well. If your site generates the batches
    at 8PM and again at midnight or some such, and you poll that site every
    hour or two, the chances are VERY good that you'll get all your news by
    the time you get in for work the next morning. If they simply don't
    batch it up during the day, you don't need to worry abou it. Using the
    'F' protocol in the sys file will keep them from using a lot of disk.

    o There is a program written locally by Mark Stein (ex Fortune hacker)
    that allowed you to shove incoming news into a queue to free up uux
    for mail. It was written for a batcher called bnproc, but there is
    probably a version somewhere for cunbatch (or it could be hacked up
    reasonably easily) and if you take the exec() of the unbatcher out of
    it, the news will just sit there. You can then use cron to run the
    unbatcher when you want.

I've found, though, that a little coordination with your upstream site and
your downstream sites tends to save a lot of hassle -- I rarely transfer
large amounts of news during the day anymore, and 95% of the changes I made
were administrative.

chuq
-- 
:From the carousel of the autumn carnival:        Chuq Von Rospach
{cbosgd,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui   nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA

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