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From: chuq@plaid.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Sharing news across NFS
Message-ID: <13833@sun.uucp>
Date: Mon, 23-Feb-87 12:23:54 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.13833
Posted: Mon Feb 23 12:23:54 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 26-Feb-87 19:56:56 EST
References: <185@quacky.mips.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Organization: Fictional Reality, uLtd
Lines: 47

In article <185@quacky.mips.UUCP> dce@quacky.UUCP (David Elliott) writes:
>In an effort to test NFS, widen news availability, and save some disk space
>(our Super-Eagles are dying), I have set up some of our local machines
>to share news across NFS.
>
>I have implemented this as follows:
>
>	1. /usr/spool/news is shared
>	2. /usr/new/lib/news is shared, but seq and sys are symbolic
>	   links to files in /usr/new/lib/news.local
>	3. Only the machine that has the news disks actually gets
>	   news from outside.
>
>I originally tried to put all files to be shared in a directory called
>usr/spool/news/shared, but the news software likes to unlink and rename
>files, which doesn't work with symbolic links.
>
>Anyway, I have a system that now works except for one thing that bothers
>me: postings made on a sharing machine update /usr/spool/news and
>/usr/new/lib/news/active. Since I use HIDDENNET, I can't set it up so
>that the main feed just doesn't forward the news.

The easiest thing to do is simply not export inews -- it doesn't deal
well with networked reality in a number of places.

What we do is use NFS to read news -- /usr/lib/news becomes
/usr/spool/news/lib (with an appropriate symlink if you want it) and the
binaries are in /usr/spool/news/bin -- that way you have a single NFS mount
point.  We also mount this read-only for reasons I'll mention in a minute.

To do remote postings, we use NNTP from Berkeley, which works fine.  Both
Pnews and Postnews work that way.  You should also be able to do remote 
posting by turning inews into a shell script that does an 'rsh <server> inews'
but I haven't played with that a lot.

The reason you want to use something like NNTP and a read-only file system
is to make sure that people are running up-todate software.  We had
continuing problems with people running 2.10.1 or 2.10.2 news on our system
long after we'd upgraded to 2.11.  Since the active file formats aren't
compatible, news kept getting mucked up.  Setting the filesystem read only
and using NNTP allows you to protect the critical files from accidental harm
while still giving you full functionality.

chuq
Chuq Von Rospach	chuq@sun.COM		[I don't read flames]

There is no statute of limitations on stupidity