Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!think!ames!elroy!mahendo!earle
From: earle@mahendo.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (Greg Earle)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: News shadow server capability?
Message-ID: <238@mahendo.Jpl.Nasa.Gov>
Date: 5 Apr 88 10:33:49 GMT
Reply-To: earle@mahendo.JPL.NASA.GOV (Greg Earle)
Organization: Gainfully Unemployed Ltd., Lake View Terrace,  CA
Lines: 32
Keywords: shadowing	NNTP

Has anyone thought about implementing a Netnews shadow capability?

In an informal discussion recently, I breached the notion that if one had
a large organizational net (say, for example, 4-5 disk servers each with
their own subnets of diskless machines and PC's, et al., along with perhaps
some other diskful machines on the backbone), it would be nice to set up
one machine as the News server for all of these.  Being basically fascistic,
we install NNTP 1.5 and rrn on all the machines, and away we go.  Of course,
if the news server goes down, your friendly local system administrator has
the screaming multitudes chanting, `Off with his head!' (-:  Now we can't have
that, so an obvious solution would be to have a `shadow' server, that talks
NNTP with the main server, and keeps all of the same articles as the main
server on-line, in case of main server crash.  Now the problem is that you
DON'T want to have seperate .newsrc files - you just want to be able to tell
people that if `server' goes down, just say `setenv NNTPSERVER shadow-server'
and all will be well.  This immediately presents the main roadblock - namely,
how do you keep the two machines perfectly in synch so that each stores the
exact same articles in the exact same numbered file names in each's own news
spool heirarchies??  Other than adding some sort of extra `article number' tag
parameter to NNTP (which would be sent along with each article to the NNTP
peer, to be used or discarded as necessary), at first crack we all shook our
heads and agreed that, yes, it was Not A Trivial Thing To Do.  And we left it
at that ...

I'm sure someone somewhere has given this some thought before.  Any bright
ideas, anyone?

-- 
	Greg Earle		earle@mahendo.JPL.NASA.GOV
	Indep. Sun consultant	earle%mahendo@jpl-elroy.ARPA	[aka:]
	(Gainfully Unemployed)	earle%mahendo@elroy.JPL.NASA.GOV
	Lake View Terrace, CA	...!{cit-vax,ames}!elroy!jplgodo!mahendo!earle