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From: mcooper@usc-oberon.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Sharing news across NFS
Message-ID: <848@usc-oberon.USC.EDU>
Date: Sun, 22-Feb-87 13:33:26 EST
Article-I.D.: usc-ober.848
Posted: Sun Feb 22 13:33:26 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 26-Feb-87 19:47:09 EST
References: <185@quacky.mips.UUCP>
Sender: news@usc-oberon.USC.EDU
Reply-To: mcooper@usc-oberon.UUCP (Michael A. Cooper)
Organization: USC Computing Services, Los Angeles
Lines: 37

I'm not sure what your problem is.  We have a similiar setup here.
News arrives from the outside world onto oberon - a VAX 750 running
4.3BSD+NFS (from Mt. Xinu).  Our spool directory is /usr/spool/news.
Our "lib" directory is /usr/lib/news which is a link to
/usr/spool/news/lib.  All 4.3BSD+NFS VAXen wishing to read news, simplying
have to mount oberon's /usr/spool/news, create a link for /usr/lib/news,
and use whatever regular news reading programs they wish (most use rn).

Our inews is not compiled with HIDDENET.  Since almost all of
/usr/spool/news is writable by group "news", the inews on the client
machines have no problem writing /usr/spool/news/.rnews (we have
SPOOLNEWS defined).  When the articles are processed by rnews -U
at a later time, inews places the correct Path: information in
place.  The From: line is the original client host the article was
posted on.  As far as inews is concerned, the article could have
arrived via UUCP for all it cares.

We also have a mixed environment of NFS machines.  Most of our Sun
systems, mount oberon's /usr/spool/news.  The setup is basically the
same for the VAXen, except instead of linking /usr/lib/news to
/usr/spool/news/lib, they link to /usr/spool/news/lib.sun.  This
directory contains mostly links to important files (like "active")
in /usr/spool/news/lib/*.  The only "real" file is a Sun binary
of inews.

There is a growing number of hosts using oberon's spool directory.
So far, the load on oberon has been fairly light.  The only exception
being when someone does a find on a client host of /usr/spool/news.
It's a big win being able to offer news to so many machines and at
the same time only have to worry about maintaining the software on
*one* machine.

			mike
-- 
Michael A. Cooper, University Computing Services, U of Southern California
  UUCP: {sdcrdcf, uscvax}!usc-oberon!mcooper  BITNET: mcooper@uscvaxq
  ARPA: mcooper@usc-oberon.USC.EDU            PHONE: (213) 743-3462