wilensky@compass.com (Marshall Wilensky - Manager of Computing Resources) (08/29/89)
Help. Someone else must have dealt with this kind of thing before.
I'm trying to build two installations of netnews that will cooperate and
coexist. Here's my situation:
My users all sit at Sun workstations. There are 48 diskless nodes and 3 file
servers. They are all Sun-3s (several different models) and all are running
SunOS 4.0.3. My main Mail/UUCP/Netnews system (interface to the outside
world) is a VAX 6310 running ULTRIX 3.0.
I need to build netnews twice in order to generate the ULTRIX and SunOS
executables, but I also need the installations to share the text files that
make it all work: active, history, etc. The users must be able to read and
post on the Suns while the incoming articles are posted by the VAX. The spool
directory is NFS mounted on every system. I create symbolic links in the
/usr/local/bin directories to give the users access to the correct executables
for the right system.
How can/should I install netnews to get this to work properly?
I first tried building the software twice in separate directories, factoring
out the text files to another directory, and trying to use links (first
symbolic then hard) to share the files. The problem was that things like
expire destroy the active file (breaking the link) and recreate it BACK IN THE
SEPARATE DIRECTORY, not in the common directory. Acticles written locally
appear only in the active file in the SunOS directory while incoming articles
appear only in the active file in the ULTRIX directory.
Most recently I tried to overlap the installations by using separate BINDIRs
but the same LIBDIR. Between the builds I moved the LIBDIR executables to
separate directories leaving the text files alone. Then I wrote a shell
script to intercept the execution of a LIBDIR executable and exec the
appropriate program from the correct directory, SunOS or ULTRIX. This isn't
working exactly right yet either, although it seems promising.
It seems to me that the problem is that there are only two variables (BINDIR
and LIBDIR) that are used to isolate three things:
user executables (located in BINDIR)
administrative executables (located in LIBDIR)
and text files (located in LIBDIR)
What I think I need is a new variable (TEXTDIR ?) that is properly and
consistently used to locate the text files, so that they can be separated from
the LIBDIR executables. Then I can create a LIBDIR and BINDIR for ULTRIX, a
LIBDIR and BINDIR for SunOS, and one TEXTDIR that is used by both.
Does this make sense? Does anyone have this already? Can someone tell me what to edit (or patch) to get this?
Please respond to me by mail. I don't yet receive this newsgroup.
Marshall Wilensky, Manager of Computing Resources
US Mail: Compass, Inc. 550 Edgewater Drive, Wakefield, MA 01880, USA.
Phone: +1 617 245 9540
Domain: wilensky@compass.com