Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-vax!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!oliveb!pyramid!prls!mips!dce
From: dce@mips.COM (David Elliott)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Organization of news binaries/data files wrt NFS
Message-ID: <2320@quacky.mips.COM>
Date: 7 Jun 88 20:51:33 GMT
Reply-To: dce@mips.COM (David Elliott)
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 30

I'm sorry if this subject has already come up, but I've been out of
touch with this group for a month or so.

We are in the process of implementing a shared news system for our
in-house systems using NFS.  We have one machine we use for the news
server, the news binary/data disk server, and we want it to be the only
machine to actually post the news.

The first part is easy, since we just point all of the machines at the
proper /usr/spool/news.  Also, the last part is easy, since we will run
NFSCLIENT-compiled code on all machines except the server.

The second part is tougher.  It's simple to set up each machine to have
the BINDIR binaries point to the right place, but harder to share the
LIBDIR stuff, since some of it is portable ASCII data and some is
nonportable binary data.

For now, we'll make do with setting up a BINDIR and LIBDIR for each
OS/hardware combination, and having symlinks for the sharable files.

Still, it would be nice if the implementors of B News 3.0 and C News
took this into account, and had a "sharable" library and a "nonsharable"
library.

Also, it would be nice to have site-specific things like NFSCLIENT,
GENERICPATH, GENERICFROM, and MYDOMAIN obtained from a configuration
file instead of having to compile it into the code.

-- 
David Elliott		dce@mips.com  or  {ames,prls,pyramid,decwrl}!mips!dce