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From: jerry@oliveb.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: NNTP vs. remote NFS mounts
Message-ID: <602@oliveb.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 5-Mar-87 15:39:36 EST
Article-I.D.: oliveb.602
Posted: Thu Mar  5 15:39:36 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Mar-87 04:20:14 EST
References: <918@smeagol.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Reply-To: jerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry F Aguirre)
Organization: Olivetti ATC; Cupertino, Ca
Lines: 54

I used to run news on 5 systems.  This was a constant series of headaches.
First there was the disk overhead of storing 5 copies of the news.  Then
there was the cpu overhead of transmitting the news to 5 systems,
running 5 expires, etc.  Then
there was the administrative overhead of having to manage news group
cancelation, corrupted files, etc.  And finally there was the problem of
alignment.  Each system diverged from the others in article numbering,
number of newsgroups, etc.  This was a pain to the users because if they
were moved from one system to another, their .newsrc became useless.  I
worked out a script using "rsh" to send news and handle queueing for
down systems.  But it was all quite unsuitable for an integrated group
of systems.

Now I have the news spool directory, the active file, etx. symbolicly
linked across the network.  I am not using NFS (we plan to get it) but
rather the public domain RFS that was posted to the net.

I am not faced with the problem of differing binaries and the
executibles used to be shared.  They are not currently because of a bug
in RFS and because of performance considerations.  However, having to
compile the executables for each type of machine and distribute them
would still be a lot less work than supporting multiple news systems.
It would even be less work than installing different versions using
NNTP.  And, of course, the users get to use whatever news reading
program they desire without installing the NNTP mods.

I don't want to knock NNTP as not everyone has NFS and NNTP can be used
for transmitting news as well as reading it.

There is one other modification usefull when news is shared.  I have
modified the news software so that it uses the "client" host name
regardless of what system it is actually running on.  Before I did this
posters on "client" systems would have a message ID and "Path:" line
showing that system's hostname only.  This caused my neighbors to send
the article back to the "server" system.  It also created confusion in
the various statistics as they would show news connections to the
"client" systems when no such connection actually existed.  I think
there was also a problem with article cancelation.  While these were not
serious problems it was easy to fix and worth doing.

It is beginning to look like enough people are using NFS to share news
that support should be included for it in the release.  I kind of brute
force figured out what files needed to be on the clients, what files
needed to be accessible to the client, and what were only necessary for
the server.  Makefile support for installing the client would have made
my work easier.

On a related topic.  Is anyone using the HIDDENNET option and happy with
it?  I got confused trying to figure out exactly what it did and from
comments on the net I suspect I am not alone.

					Jerry Aguirre
					Systems Administration
					Olivetti ATC