chuqui@cae780.UUCP (12/21/83)
I just made the grand experiment, and it seems to have moved wonderfully. The only thing that needs changing is SPOOL in Makefile, and to recompile and resintall everything (and move the data, of course). Posting, reading, checking, cancelling, and expiring all seem normal (even expire with archive..) One comment on expire with archive: The place where stuff is archived is dependent upon where SPOOL is. What happens is that it strips the final directory name (normally news) and replaces it with oldnews. So, /u/news becomes /u/oldnews. Expire will NOT archive unless oldnews exists (it WILL create subequent directories, tho...). I now have a couple of hundred megabytes to play with, rather than 9 megabytes to share with uucp and lpd. FLame away, folks! chuq
bob@onyx.UUCP (12/22/83)
Speaking of moving /usr/spool/news and such. We experienced the problem of /usr/spool being on a different file system than /usr/lib/uucp causing UUCP to fail because it tried to link files from /usr/spool/uucp to /usr/lib/uucp/.XQTDIR. (/usr/lib/uucp was on the root FS which was full.) The cheap fix (and only one if you don't have source) is to patch uuxqt (in /usr/lib/uucp) replacing '/usr/lib/uucp/.XQTDIR' with '/usr/spool/uucp/.XQTD' in the several places it occurs and creating said directory mode 777. Strings can be useful in finding these occurrences. I can provide a program for patching.
dave@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Sherman) (12/28/83)
So don't mount a new file system on /usr/spool. Mount it on /usr/spool/news.
Dave Sherman
Toronto
--
{allegra,cornell,decvax,ihnp4,linus,utzoo}!utcsrgv!davetjt@kobold.UUCP (T.J.Teixeira) (12/30/83)
utcsrgv!dave (Dave Sherman) says:
So don't mount a new file system on /usr/spool. Mount it on /usr/spool/news.
This won't work if you want to archive old news since expire uses the
link system call to put the article in the oldnews subtree, and the
link fails if the oldnews directory isn't on the same file system as
the news directory.
Extra credit: why won't symbolic links (which *do* work across file
systems) solve the problem?
--
Tom Teixeira, Massachusetts Computer Corporation. Westford MA
...!{ihnp4,harpo,decvax,ucbcad,tektronix}!masscomp!tjt (617) 692-6200davel@dciem.UUCP (Dave Legg) (01/06/84)
There is an easy cure for the link problem. Make oldnews a subdirectory
of news. The easy way to do this is to add a / at the end of the path
in the header file, then the code in expire that searches for the last /
finds the one at the end of the string and just appends oldnews to it.
The rest of the news software generates paths with // in them, but
UN*X handles this gracefully.
--
Dave Legg, DCIEM, Toronto, Ont. Canada.
{linus,ihnp4,uw-beaver,floyd}!utcsrgv!dciem!davel
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!dciem!davelsmoot@ut-sally.UUCP (Smoot Carl-Mitchell) (01/09/84)
All sites running Berkeley Unix can, of course, just use symbolic
links to move "/usr/spool/news" without changing the news software at all.
We moved news here to a separate disk, mainly to balance the i/o load
without any problems. Symbolic links have proven to be a very useful
tool for this kind of activity.
One of my pet peeves about a lot of software (and news is no exception)
is the "hardwiring" of paths into the source. At the very least
the files the software uses should be modifiable in the Makefile without
having to muck around with the actual sources. Personally I like the
way sendmail (the standard mail router from Berkeley) configures itself.
All filenames used by sendmail are put in a human readable configuration
file. The only filename the program needs to know is the name of the
configuration file and it can be set via an argument, if need be. If news
was written in this manner then you would only have to change the name of
the news spool directory in the configuration file to actually move the
news articles to a separate file system.
--
Smoot Carl-Mitchell, CS Dept. University of Texas at Austin
{seismo, ctvax, ihnp4, kpno}!ut-sally!smoot, smoot@ut-sally.{ARPA, UUCP}