nctingue@ndsuvax.UUCP (Mark Tinguely) (08/12/89)
Maybe, I had too high of expectations for Cnews, or possible Cnews is designed for batching systems (and we run as an nntp only site). In any way you look at it Cnews is NOT for us. An article must first run though a script file (inews) which immediately calls another script file (which goes through all kinds of space worries -- by our indications a typcal news article is 2K bytes long, does the disk free have to occur on every file? how about doing this once an hour or so!). The saga continues in an executable, which sets some things up and call yet another script that is now prepared to do something useful. When Cnews is working on some incoming news our system goes to hell. Yes, I know I will be flamed by the "Cnews-ers", so I will only breifly mention that the `readnews, `checknews', and `postnews' were so poor, that they were the first files to go. Now I am spending a few hours of the week-end to correct the damage of a week with Cnews. ps. I hated NN also, but that is another tale. -- Mark Tinguely North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105 UUCP: ...!uunet!ndsuvax!nctingue BITNET: nctingue@ndsuvax.bitnet INTERNET: nctingue@plains.NoDak.edu
geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) (08/13/89)
Mark, you are looking at things the wrong way, perhaps due to prolonged exposure to B news. First, you don't have to choose between B news and C news, you can run them in parallel. Second, you aren't using our nntp stuff, so it's hardly fair to blame C news for your misconfiguration: nntp should not be invoking inews for every article, it should be producing an input batch and eventually invoking newsrun. Thirdly, perhaps you might in future do us the courtesy of consulting us with your problems by mail before flaming in public and making yourself look bad. -- Geoff Collyer utzoo!utstat!geoff, geoff@utstat.toronto.edu
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (08/13/89)
In article <2828@ndsuvax.UUCP> nctingue@ndsuvax.UUCP (Mark Tinguely) writes: > Maybe, I had too high of expectations for Cnews, or possible Cnews is designed > for batching systems (and we run as an nntp only site). In any way you look at > it Cnews is NOT for us. > [efficiency woes with feeding every article through inews] This is why we included fixes for NNTP for batching. There is NO WAY to make news handling really efficient unless input is batched; with our NNTP fixes, NNTP C News is a lot faster than NNTP B News ever was. We cannot be responsible for what happens if you install only part of our software. > An article must first run though a script file (inews) which immediately calls > another script file (which goes through all kinds of space worries -- by our > indications a typcal news article is 2K bytes long, does the disk free have to > occur on every file? how about doing this once an hour or so!)... If you are confident that nothing else ever eats up space suddenly, and that news throughput is slow enough that it can't get itself in trouble in the space of half an hour, this would be reasonable. Neither of these is true in general. (In particular, I assure you that C News can get itself into deep space trouble in half an hour if it's properly installed.) I thought long and hard about less frequent space checking, and couldn't find a safe way to do it. > ... the `readnews, `checknews', and `postnews' were so poor, that > they were the first files to go... As we have clearly and repeatedly stated, they are provided only as a minimal user interface for people who have nothing else. If you have superior alternatives that suit the needs of your users, you *should* delete ours. We've never claimed they are good, only that they are simple and workable. -- V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
lamy@ai.utoronto.ca (Jean-Francois Lamy) (09/10/89)
I vaguely remember replies to this when I came back from vacation and it is likely a phantom message coming back, but in any case... Just run nntp with the C news patches, and you will get much better mileage. NNTP 1.5.6 has the code merged in, modulo a trivial typo or two for which I posted patches to news.software.nntp (and sent to the maintainer). We are mostly an NNTP site too. Jean-Francois Lamy lamy@ai.utoronto.ca, uunet!ai.utoronto.ca!lamy AI Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4