Path: utzoo!utstat!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!moraes
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: moraes@cs.toronto.edu (Mark Moraes)
Subject: Re: Dynamic "smart" expiration?
Message-ID: <89Dec31.171430est.2251@neat.cs.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
References: <1989Dec27.033817.9953@smsc.sony.com> <1989Dec28.063932.13720@robohack.UUCP> <68634@looking.on.ca> <1989Dec29.213539.2801@utzoo.uucp> <6118@yunexus.UUCP> <69448@looking.on.ca> <1120@utoday.UUCP> <`QF52&@rpi.edu> <69654@looking.on.ca>
Date: 31 Dec 89 22:15:15 GMT
Lines: 31

Um, not everyone runs the same news configuration - on some sites, it
is impossible to find out all the .newsrc files -- our news machine is
server for close to 100 machines in this building, (maybe more -- I
haven't an easy way of telling:-) all of which NFS-mount /news.  (We
use NFS for reading news, NNTP for posting news, and a continuously
running NNTP for exchanging news:-) Many of the machines that NFS
mount the partition are in ADMINSTRATIVELY separate domains.  News
maintainers do not have root, occasionally do not have accounts on all
subscriber machines.

I don't think we want to force every newsreader to be written to have
a .newsrc either. (eg. I have a news scanning script that uses it's own
files to keep track of what news it has scanned/forwarded. Many of the
newsgroups it scans are not in my .newsrc) Or even worse, complicate
the already, er, convoluted internals of most newsreaders to provide
central subscriber lists.

For us, centralizing .newsrcs is technically hard (we prefer less
interdependency between our servers, not more) and politically
impossible.  The idea of putting any more load on our considerably
overloaded news machine would not go over well -- a lot of effort has
been put into trimming wasted CPU on that machine to keep performance
bearable.  Yes, I know, that's our problem. But I suspect we're not
alone in running news on machines that have to perform other duties
(Real Work) to earn their keep. It's much simpler to run pessimistic
time-based expires on newsgroups that we consider less than vitally
important.

	Mark
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"It's only netnews" -- Geoff Collyer, loosely paraphrasing Peter Honeyman.