[news.sysadmin] Symbolic links to cross-posted articles

carris@dinl.uucp (John P. Carris) (02/16/88)

I believe this topic came up before but I didn't pay attention to the
response/solution because I didn't realize I had the same problem until
recently. I am running news 2.11 B patch level #14. I assumed that any
cross posted articles were being symbolically linked to one primary
article. This is not the case. Identical copies of the same article are
being produced. Does anyone have a solution to this problem? I am running
ULTRIX 2.0 on a MicroVAX II. Thanx in advance.
-- 
John Carris			|	Martin Marietta Information and Communication Systems
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fair@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Erik E. Fair) (02/16/88)

Netnews uses UNIX "hard" links to link the multiple instantiations
of a news article into the multiple newsgroup directories. Netnews
is most certainly NOT making N copies of an article for appearance
in N newsgroups, except on VMS systems, under Eunice (but then,
they deserve to lose). I suggest that you go back and read up on the
UNIX filesystem structure, paying particular attention to the concept
of "inodes" and "directories." A "hard" link is simply another
directory entry that refers to the same inode; no extra disk space
required, modulo that required by the directory entry.

	Erik E. Fair	ucbvax!fair	fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu

jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) (02/17/88)

In article <23012@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> fair@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Erik E. Fair) writes:
>Netnews uses UNIX "hard" links to link the multiple instantiations
>of a news article into the multiple newsgroup directories. Netnews
>is most certainly NOT making N copies of an article for appearance
>in N newsgroups, except on VMS systems, under Eunice (but then,
>they deserve to lose).

Nope.  I did the Eunice code for 2.11 news, and it makes the
equivalent of symbolic links.  The article is stored under the
first newsgroup, and the remaining newsgroups have a tiny file
containing nothing but the name of the first file (I stole this
from Larry Wall's Eunice code in "rn").
-- 
- Joe Buck  {uunet,ucbvax,sun,<smart-site>}!epimass.epi.com!jbuck
	    Old Internet mailers: jbuck%epimass.epi.com@uunet.uu.net

jfh@killer.UUCP (The Beach Bum) (02/18/88)

In article <23012@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> fair@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Erik E. Fair) writes:
>Netnews uses UNIX "hard" links to link the multiple instantiations
>of a news article into the multiple newsgroup directories. Netnews
>is most certainly NOT making N copies of an article for appearance
>in N newsgroups, except on VMS systems, under Eunice (but then,
>they deserve to lose).
>
>	Erik E. Fair	ucbvax!fair	fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu

There was an interesting mis-feature in VMS prior to version 3.0 which
allowed (and may still allow) creating something like hard links by
judicious use of COPY/OVERLAY and a few other simple commands to create
a fake directory (which was then copied onto the real directory).

Has this been fixed?  Has anyone found anything useful to do with it?
Did you even know this bug existed?

- John.
-- 
John F. Haugh II                  SNAIL:  HECI Exploration Co. Inc.
UUCP: ...!ihnp4!killer!jfh                11910 Greenville Ave, Suite 600
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