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From: fair@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Erik E. Fair)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: News Batching Software
Message-ID: <17859@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Mon, 16-Mar-87 03:28:55 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.17859
Posted: Mon Mar 16 03:28:55 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 17-Mar-87 01:24:41 EST
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Summary: Uh, uux -l wasn't *my* idea...

Sorry, the "-l" (link) flag to uux wasn't my idea. It passed through my
hands long ago either as part of the B news 2.10 release (which
contained a number of mods for UUCP in the form of diffs that Mark
Horton put together), or I got it from Mark Stein, then of Fortune
Systems, now of SUN Microsystems. I forget which. I know that the
batching system we used this with (bnproc) was from Mark Stein.

Why this is useful is easy to see: if you can ship the exact same
batch file to several sites, you can use one queue file with links.
This is a win because:

1. you save on disk space in your /usr/spool/uucp queue area.
2. incremental cost of feeding a new site is some more C. files in the
	queue area, and more modem time.
	
There are several caveats, though:

	1. all neighbors *must* use the same batch file format
	2. all neighbors *must* be "leaf" nodes (i.e. they don't send
		you much in the way of news)
	3. if you are tight on queue space, it only takes one
		incommunicado neighbor to muck things up

Caveat #2 is most important: to do this right, you set up a "pseudo"
site in your sys file, from which you ship batches to the list of leaf
nodes. However, since the "pseudo" site name does not match the name of
any of the leaf sites that you're sending those articles to, anything
that THEY send to YOU will get sent back to THEM by this system. If one
of your leaves hooks up to another system and gets a major feed, you'll
be sending back copies of all the articles that come over that path, to
be rejected when they reach the leaf that sent them to you. Ugh.

This system does work pretty well, though. In the heyday of "dual" as
a major netnews hub for the San Franciso Bay Area, we were taking
three full netnews feeds, and feeding five leaf nodes with the linked
queue files (not bad for a small 68000 system with 160Mbytes of disk,
and two modems...)

	Erik E. Fair	ucbvax!fair	fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu