Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!kuhub.cc.ukans.edu!anu-news!list From: reggers@UWOVAX.UWO.CA (Reg Quinton) Newsgroups: news.software.anu-news Subject: Synching NNTP client with Unix server Message-ID: <0633960580@uwovax.uwo.ca> Date: 2 Feb 90 17:09:40 GMT Sender: ANU-NEWS Discussion Reply-To: Reg Quinton Lines: 52 There's been some considerable discussion of late on the issue of how to get your ANU/News NNTP client machine synch'ed with your Unix NNTP server machine. I'd like to make some observations since I'm also fighting this issue too. First, I think there's a consensus that the daily SKIM isn't good enough for two reasons a) it's daily, not every 15 min (old news is history, not news). b) it's tediously slow. The problem is the strategy for getting the client and server in synch. What's going on is the client is connecting to the server and then, for every group, it says "what have you got?". A lot of work goes on at both sides with this strategy. The usual method for dispersing News on Usenet is a flooding strategy. nntp support uses the 'ihave' protocol for flooding news articles. The client side will respond to 'ihave x' by saying either 'sendme x' or something to the effect of 'tell me more' (I don't know the command). In any case, the point of all of this is the nntp implementations on the Unix side synchronizes data bases by having the server call the client (unlike ANU/NEWS) and flood with the 'Ihave/Sendme' protocol. This is the reality you have to keep in mind when you're dealing with Unix servers -- they've been optimized to do it this way. I've been trying to use this kind of strategy to keep my ANU/NEWS client in synch with my UNIX server. What I've done is marked each group as NNTP served off my server and I broadcast all articles received to VMS side using the noted ihave/sendme protocol (the Unix procedure to do this is called nntpsend and is usually invoked out by cron every 15 minutes or so). This results in articles being flooded quickly to the VMS side but has a few problems: 1. the ANU/NEWS nntp server is taking the *ENTIRE* article (header and body) and squirreling it away in a batch file for later posting. - it would be wiser to ask for just the header (as in the skim operation). - and we all want the nntp server to post right away instead of squirreling things in a file. 2. I still need to run a daily skim but if I've got the two machines expiring news at the same rate then there's no need to do a skim/served. I know that lots of people are working with Goeff's NNTP code; I hope these scratchings are kept in mind.