Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!oliveb!jerry
From: jerry@oliveb.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: News shadow server capability?
Message-ID: <19534@oliveb.olivetti.com>
Date: 6 Apr 88 21:59:56 GMT
References: <238@mahendo.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> <5518@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Reply-To: jerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre)
Organization: Olivetti ATC; Cupertino, Ca
Lines: 28
Keywords: shadowing	NNTP

In article <5518@spool.cs.wisc.edu> dave@spool.cs.wisc.edu (Dave Cohrs) writes:
>In article <238@mahendo.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> earle@mahendo.JPL.NASA.GOV (Greg Earle) writes:
>>Has anyone thought about implementing a Netnews shadow capability?
>How about setting up an line in your sys file:
>
>backupserver:all:F:/usr/spool/news/batch/backupstuff

This won't work.  The "F" flag will save only the name of the first link
to each article.  If the article is cross posted then the other links
will not get created on the shadow machine.

An obvious solution is to add a new flag that works like "F" but lists
all the links.  You could then use that output to periodically update
the secondary server using "tar" or some other transfer method that
would maintain the link structure.  Another idea is to process this
history file to create the file names to transfer.  It includes the
names of all the links and is in the order that they arrived.

As someone else mentioned "rdist" could be used.  I think that the
overhead of scanning the entire news spool directory, file by file,
would be prohibitive.  It might be OK for a nightly check but you
couldn't use it every hour.

The same is probably true of running "find" on the news spool directory.
It would run faster than "rdist" in that it would only have to look for
recent files, not compare each one to the server.

					Jerry Aguirre