Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!ptsfa!pacbell!vixie!paul
From: paul@vixie.UUCP (Paul Vixie Esq)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Two News feeds
Message-ID: <802@vixie.UUCP>
Date: 10 Feb 88 15:00:05 GMT
References: <484@wa3wbu.UUCP>
Reply-To: paul@vixie.UUCP (Paul Vixie Esq)
Organization: Vixie Enterprises, San Francisco
Lines: 34

In article <484@wa3wbu.UUCP> john@wa3wbu.UUCP (John Gayman) writes:
>
>   I'm currently attempting to have two systems feed me News. Is this
>advisable and if so, how can I set up my "sys" file so that all the news
>I get from each site doesn't get forwarded to the other site ?  I put
>the "L" flag on the one feed but it looks like I never saw any of the
>News that came in last night. Any ideas ???

Unless you have several modems and a system powerful enough to take in
two feeds at the same time, you should look into ihave/sendme protocol
on one of the two systems.  This is actually pretty easy to set up; I
think you just use the :I: flag, and the batch file gets written in a
different format.  When you 'sendbatch', it sends a list of article-ID's
to the remote system, and it sends back 'sendme' messages (in a batch)
for the ones it hasn't got already.  If the neighbor uses :I: for you
as well, it'll be bidirectional.  This imposes an extra delay on getting
news, so you shouldn't use it on all your feeds -- all but one is how I
run it at UB.Com.  It is imperfect -- you can often get an article through
another source between the time you send a 'sendme' and the time the
article is actually sent by that feed.  So you still get duplicates.  Just
not as many.

The :Lx: flag is also very important -- and you need it on both sites, since
what it means is "only send articles to this site which originated within x
hops of my site."  (I could be one off here.)  :L0: means only the articles
posted locally get sent to that machine, :L1: means your local articles and
all articles local to your immediate netnews neighbors, etc.  If you put this
on one feed's sys line and not another's, you will be sending the :L:-less
site all the articles you get from any other site.
-- 
Paul A Vixie Esq
paul%vixie@uunet.uu.net
{uunet,ptsfa,hoptoad}!vixie!paul
San Francisco, (415) 647-7023