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From: dclemans@mntgfx.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: How news works at Apollo
Message-ID: <533@dclemans.mntgfx.MENTOR.COM>
Date: Mon, 23-Feb-87 17:05:58 EST
Article-I.D.: dclemans.533
Posted: Mon Feb 23 17:05:58 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 27-Feb-87 04:26:51 EST
References: <3340234a.982f@apollo.uucp>
Organization: Mentor Graphics, Beaverton OR
Lines: 20

We run a news system on an Apollo ring at Mentor Graphics that's similar
to what Jim describes (though smaller).  There are a couple of points
about rn and vn that might be of interest...

rn as distributed wants to periodically re-read the news active file
while rn is running, to tell the user about any new news that arrives
in the meantime.  It does that by leaving the file open, and periodically
seeking back to the beginning and re-reading.  However that locks the
news active file from being written, which makes it hard to post new local
articles and to receive new foreign articles.  I took an easy path out
and modified rn to copy the active file at invocation to a local
temporary file, and then to just read that file.

vn (both the 5/86 and the 12/86 versions) has a bug in that there is
a local subroutine that opens the active file for reading using a local
variable.  It then returns from the subroutine without closing the file,
thus leaving the active file read-locked.  This is fixed by adding
an "fclose" to that subroutine.

dgc