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From: myers@orange.qtp.ufl.edu (John G. Myers)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: NFS news - problem ??
Message-ID: <118@red2.orange.qtp.ufl.edu>
Date: Mon, 28-Sep-87 09:55:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: red2.118
Posted: Mon Sep 28 09:55:25 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 30-Sep-87 06:13:38 EDT
References: <1396@osiris.UUCP> <271@flmis06.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: myers@orange.qtp.ufl.edu (John G. Myers)
Organization: University of Florida Quantum Theory Project
Lines: 33

In article <271@flmis06.ATT.COM> mikel@flmis06.ATT.COM (Mikel Manitius) writes:
>> 	Is there any reason why one system, that supports spooled
>> news files, can't export /usr/spool/news to other systems under
>> NFS ? Since nothing would be changed, it seems to be that the only
>> hacks needed would be to postnews, rather than vnews. Have I overlooked
>> something obvious ? 
>
>We do this over RFS. The idea is simple, and you don't really need hacks
>into any of the software. The only problem arrises when you export
>/usr/lib/news and the remote system doesn't see itself in the sys file
>when you post something.

We do this over NFS.  We have both /usr/spool/news and /usr/lib/news exported
under NFS and we define HIDDENNET to be "orange", our mail guru.  The only
hack necessary is in our sys file, the contents of which are given below:

orange:world,comp,sci,(...),fl,uf,to::/bin/true
bikini:world,comp,sci,(...),fl,uf,to.bikini:F

When a system other than orange posts, it uses the value of HIDDENNET
to look for itself in the sys file, so it finds itself.  When deciding
which hosts to deliver the post to, however, it uses its own hostname
to look through the sys file.  Thus, we tell it to use /bin/true to
"deliver" its post to orange.

We actually store the news spool file on another host, "red", so we had
to modify nntpd to setuid() itself to "news" in order to get around the
NFS "root" --> "nobody" mapping.

John G. Myers
News Administrator		UUCP: ...!inhp4!codas!ufcsv!ufqtp!myers
Quantum Theory Project		ARPA: myers%orange.qtp.ufl.edu@relay.cs.net
University of Florida		      myers@[128.227.16.1]