chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) (03/15/91)
We just got an IBM RS/6000, and it was going relatively unused, so we
decided to move Usenet there. It turned out to be a little more
complicated than I expected. I'm sure other people have run into
these problems: what did you do?
RS/6000:
A partition /news, with NEWSBIN of /news/cbin, NEWSLIB of
/news/lib, and NEWSCONFIG of /news/lib/bin/config.
SCO UNIX:
The RS/6000 /news directory is NFS mounted as /u/news.
NEWSBIN is /u/news/cbin-sco, NEWSLIB is /u/news/lib (shared),
and NEWSCONFIG is /u/news/lib/bin/config-sco.
C NEWS SEMI-BUG #1:
Shared NEWSLIB is made difficult by the setnewsids program,
which is architecture-specific but which lives in NEWSLIB.
PROGRAMMING HACKERY:
I hacked conf/build and relay/relaynews.c to put "setnewsids"
in NEWSBIN instead of NEWSLIB, which allowed me to share NEWSLIB.
C NEWS SEMI-BUG #2:
Remote (client) inews is quite smart, automatically running
relaynews on the server. But it has a bug: it assumes that
the paths on the server are the same as those on the client.
SYMLINK HACKERY:
On the RS/6000, I created a real directory /u/news to support
remote requests. The symlinks are:
/u/news/lib -> /news/lib (expected, probably not needed)
/u/news/spool -> /news/spool (also fine, also unnecessary)
/u/news/cbin-sco -> /news/cbin (KLUDGE ALERT)
REQUEST:
Perhaps C News installation should put the appropriate commands
for relaynews (PATH=, etc.) in NEWSLIB/server-inews. Then all
clients can run server inews without making path assumptions.
In any case, I have news working now. Thanks, guys.
--
Chip Salzenberg at Teltronics/TCT <chip@tct.uucp>, <uunet!pdn!tct!chip>
"Most of my code is written by myself. That is why so little gets done."
-- Herman "HLLs will never fly" Rubinmolenda@s1.msi.umn.edu (Jason Molenda) (03/17/91)
I thought I'd describe my experiences getting Cnews to work in
our networked environment.. It wasn't any near as hard as what
Chip's sounded like. :)
We have a setup of Sun-3/Sun-4/SGI Iris machines. We have NFS
exporting all of the directories so that the disk layout will
"look" the same no matter which machine you happen to be on.
This obviously simplified my problem quite a bit.
Since Cnews was running on one of our Sun-3 server machines
and it did all of the news processing, the only thing we
really had to deal with was users posting news from the
other-architecture machines.
Inews seems to want to run some binaries and I was too lazy to
sit down and figure out which it wanted to run and recompile
Cnews for every weird architecture machine we happend to have,
so I added the following lines to inews near the top:
if test `/bin/arch` != 'sun3'; then
/usr/ucb/rsh s0.msi /usr/local/share/lib/newsbin/inject/inews $*
exit 0 # this should be whatever rsh returns but I can't remember how to do
# that in sh right now.
fi
(okay, so I never got around to fixing that exit call... hey, it _works_ :-)
So it would just transfer the load to our news processing machine.
It avoided the problem of multiple binaries altogether and has worked
great ever since.
--
Jason Molenda, Tech Support, Iris & News Admin, Minnesota Supercomputer Inst
molenda@msi.umn.edu || "You can tune a piano but you can't tuna fish."kaul@icarus.eng.ohio-state.edu (Rich Kaul) (03/17/91)
In article <1991Mar16.164121.2575@s1.msi.umn.edu> molenda@s1.msi.umn.edu (Jason Molenda) writes:
I thought I'd describe my experiences getting Cnews to work in
our networked environment... [...]
Since Cnews was running on one of our Sun-3 server machines
and it did all of the news processing, the only thing we
really had to deal with was users posting news from the
other-architecture machines.
We did it yet another way: NFS mounting the news spool and using NNTP
to submit articles to the news server for posting. It worked fine.
We've since switched to all NNTP to keep the rebooting problems to a
minimum (lots of machines all booting at the same time and trying to
mount a bunch of file systems tends to cause storms and nothing ever
quite boots correctly) and besides, it's cleaner to administer this
way.
--
Rich Kaul | "They that can give up essential liberty
kaul@icarus.eng.ohio-state.edu | to obtain a little temporary safety
or ...!osu-cis!kaul | deserve neither liberty nor safety."clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis) (03/18/91)
In article <27DFD553.5FB9@tct.uucp> chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes: >We just got an IBM RS/6000, and it was going relatively unused, so we >decided to move Usenet there. It turned out to be a little more >complicated than I expected. I'm sure other people have run into >these problems: what did you do? >RS/6000: > A partition /news, with NEWSBIN of /news/cbin, NEWSLIB of > /news/lib, and NEWSCONFIG of /news/lib/bin/config. [Chip describes other arrangements on NFS'd machines] >C NEWS SEMI-BUG #2: > Remote (client) inews is quite smart, automatically running > relaynews on the server. But it has a bug: it assumes that > the paths on the server are the same as those on the client. Wouldn't most of your problems go away if you symlinked/rmounted all of the cnews directories into the "usual" places (ala, /usr/lib/news, /usr/lib/newsbin, /usr/spool/news etc.) in all of the machines? Thus you can have everything physically where you wanted, but "virtually" the same everywhere. (I've installed Cnews on a RS/6000 and had no troubles at all, though, of course, it ain't networked with anybody. The install on it used up almost my whole disk for /usr, so I had to put news on the /u partition. But I symlinked everything under /usr. And when I was able to clean /usr up, I just needed to copy things over to where they should be and resymlink them) -- Chris Lewis, clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca or ...uunet!mitel!cunews!latour!ecicrl!clewis Psroff support: psroff-request@eci386.uucp, or call 613-832-0541 (Canada) (If this message has a ".bitnet" return address, please send me a copy!)
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (03/20/91)
In article <27DFD553.5FB9@tct.uucp> chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes: >C NEWS SEMI-BUG #1: > Shared NEWSLIB is made difficult by the setnewsids program, > which is architecture-specific but which lives in NEWSLIB. Yeah, that one's awkward, although setnewsids is probably not long for this world. > Remote (client) inews is quite smart, automatically running > relaynews on the server. But it has a bug: it assumes that > the paths on the server are the same as those on the client. Hard to get around without other kinds of ad-hocery. We assumed shared filesystems meant shared name space. -- "[Some people] positively *wish* to | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology believe ill of the modern world."-R.Peto| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry
chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) (03/20/91)
According to clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis): >Wouldn't most of your problems go away if you symlinked/rmounted >all of the cnews directories into the "usual" places (ala, >/usr/lib/news, /usr/lib/newsbin, /usr/spool/news etc.) in all of >the machines? SCO UNIX doesn't support symlinks. -- Chip Salzenberg at Teltronics/TCT <chip@tct.uucp>, <uunet!pdn!tct!chip> "All this is conjecture of course, since I *only* post in the nude. Nothing comes between me and my t.b. Nothing." -- Bill Coderre
clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis) (03/22/91)
In article <27E7737D.157D@tct.uucp> chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes: >According to clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis): >>Wouldn't most of your problems go away if you symlinked/rmounted >>all of the cnews directories into the "usual" places (ala, >>/usr/lib/news, /usr/lib/newsbin, /usr/spool/news etc.) in all of >>the machines? >SCO UNIX doesn't support symlinks. I was referring to the RS/6000's, and I thought you got symlinks (or something similar to it) with NFS on the Xenix systems anyways. Sorry. -- Chris Lewis, clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca or ...uunet!mitel!cunews!latour!ecicrl!clewis Psroff support: psroff-request@eci386.uucp, or call 613-832-0541 (Canada) **** somebody's mailer is appending .bitnet to my From: address. If you see this, please use the address in the signature, and send me a copy of the headers of the mail message with the .bitnet return address. Thanks!