roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) (06/10/91)
Our main news machine is currently a vax which is going to be
decommisioned soon so we want to switch news to a sun server. We're
running C-news and nntp. People on the vax read news with rn, and those on
suns read it with rrn. After the switch, we want people on the vax to
start using rrn too. We want to have both systems running for a while to
make sure the new one is working right before we turn off news on our vax.
The problem is, we don't want to invalidate everybody's .newsrc
file. Is there any reasonable way to make the article numbers (i.e.
contents of the active file) on the new sun news server match those on the
old vax news server, and stay in sync?
--
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy
"Arcane? Did you say arcane? It wouldn't be Unix if it wasn't arcane!"jbuck@forney.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck) (06/11/91)
In article <1991Jun10.125338.12502@phri.nyu.edu>, roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes: |> Our main news machine is currently a vax which is going to be |> decommisioned soon so we want to switch news to a sun server. We're |> running C-news and nntp. People on the vax read news with rn, and those on |> suns read it with rrn. After the switch, we want people on the vax to |> start using rrn too. We want to have both systems running for a while to |> make sure the new one is working right before we turn off news on our vax. |> |> The problem is, we don't want to invalidate everybody's .newsrc |> file. Is there any reasonable way to make the article numbers (i.e. |> contents of the active file) on the new sun news server match those on the |> old vax news server, and stay in sync? I know of no way to make the two systems stay in sync, but you could achieve the transition as follows: 1) Get the people on the vax using rrn even though the server is local (have them go through rrn anyway). 2) When you know that everyone can use rrn successfully, bring down both systems, and do rcp -r vax:/usr/spool/news sun:/usr/spool/news rcp vax:/usr/lib/news/active sun:/usr/lib/news rcp vax:/usr/lib/news/history* sun:/usr/lib/news (plus any other files I've forgotten about). Now you'll need to fix up the articles you've copied. You can pass each article through a sed script that changes any occurence of the vax hostname in the header to the sun hostname. You should then be in business with everyone's .newsrc valid; they would just change their NNTPSERVER variable. -- Joe Buck jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu {uunet,ucbvax}!galileo.berkeley.edu!jbuck
anselmo-ed@cs.yale.edu (Ed Anselmo) (06/11/91)
We've switched newsreading machines twice since I've been here (two
years). The first time, we tried to keep articles numbers in sync.
That didn't work. The last switchover went pretty smoothly. Here's
how we did it last April (our news reading machine is nntp-only):
1) Run news on the new machine and verify that everything is working.
Don't worry about keeping things in sync.
2) Announce the switchover, and announce that news will be unavailable
for a while.
3) Shut down news on the old machine (kill off nntpd, edit inetd.conf,
whatever it takes). Shut down mail/news gatewaying. You don't want
any new articles sneaking in there.
3.5) make sure that news and nntp is disabled on the new machine too.
4) Move the active file from the old machine to the new machine. If
the new machine is acquiring the old machine's name, now is probably as
good a time as any to reconfigure the new machine.
5) get rid of any existing articles on the new machine.
6) dump the old spool partition and restore onto the new machine.
6.5) if you have to reconfigure rrn on the client machines, this would
be a good time to do that (while waiting for restore to complete).
7) run $NEWSBIN/expire/mkhistory or expire -h -r or whatever is
appropriate, and build a new history file.
8) Start up nntp again. You should be back in business.
This took us the better part of a day to accomplish, most of it spent
waiting for dumps and restores and mkhistory to complete. No
complaints from users, except for the inevitable "Why can't I read
news right now?".
-- Ed
--
Ed Anselmo anselmo-ed@cs.yale.edu {harvard,cmcl2}!yale!anselmo-edmwarren@rws1.ma30.bull.com (Mark Warren) (06/11/91)
roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes: > The problem is, we don't want to invalidate everybody's .newsrc >file. Is there any reasonable way to make the article numbers (i.e. >contents of the active file) on the new sun news server match those on the >old vax news server, and stay in sync? The good news is, the answer is very simple. The bad news is, the answer is a resounding NO. All you can do is, starting at midnight, or some other quiet time, shut down all internal and external posting sources, then copy the entire news spool hierarchy, and the active file, from the old machine to the new machine. Then, rebuild history, and now bring up the new machine. Tell everyone in the world to stop reading news on the old machine and start on the new. The only other addition I can think of is for the old machine to NFS mount the news spool directory on the new machine while people are transitioning. Keeping two machines, both running as servers, in sync, is impossible for more than a few minutes. Sorry. OH PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, let SOMEONE tell me I am wrong!!!! -- == Mark Warren Bull HN Information Systems Inc. == == (508) 294-3171 (FAX 294-3020) 300 Concord Road MS836A == == M.Warren@bull.com Billerica, MA 01821 ==
warlock@ecst.csuchico.edu (John Kennedy) (06/12/91)
In article <mwarren.676636523@rws1> Mark Warren writes: > roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes: > > >> The problem is, we don't want to invalidate everybody's .newsrc >> file. Is there any reasonable way to make the article numbers (i.e. >> contents of the active file) on the new sun news server match those on the >> old vax news server, and stay in sync? > > The good news is, the answer is very simple. The bad news is, the answer > is a resounding NO. > > OH PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, let SOMEONE tell me I am wrong!!!! Ok. Maybe. (-: Beware that I couldn't find the original article here, and don't know what news server you're using, but now is as good a time as any to upgrade to CNews and learn all about RFC's. (-:{ When I went from one version of CNews to another, switching data-base types (dbm to dbz), I just kept the old spool directory and configuration files (with a few exceptions, and a few additions, and some translations, but all very easy and having nothing to do with database conversions) and did a mkhistory. This program went through my spool directory and rebuilt my database. Took a while, but it kept my article ID's intact. Very handy, because the administrative Vax users with that touchy reader would have come chasing after me with axes if they lost their daily installment of alt.romance. (-: I'd guess that if you had any spool directory structure like CNews's and a active file in a similar format you could have a fairly painless conversion. --- John -- Warlock, AKA +-----------------------------------------------+ John Kennedy | internet: warlock@ecst.csuchico.edu | CSU Chico +-----------------------------------------------+ KC6RCK IBM, You BM, We All BM for IBM!