erf@progress.UUCP (Eric Feigenson) (08/02/90)
Hi! We're looking to set up a new machine for our news/mail gateway (via UUCP) to the outside world. We have a dedicated '386 machine with lots of disk space at our disposal. What we need now is to determine the best OS and other software to run to best serve our news/mail needs. Our configuration is as follows: The '386 will be connected to our feeds (one for news, one for mail) via UUCP. It will be connected to the rest of our machines via ethernet. It is not intended that anyone actually log on to the '386 to read news or mail, the network will take care of that (for mail, the '386 should forward it to the appropriate node on the network for the addressee). Note that we *don't* want to distribute news from the '386 box; all news will stay on the '386 and be read remotely somehow (which is the gist of my question, I suppose). The nodes on the network that will be interested in reading news are mostly Suns and Sequents, and maybe a PC or two (but the PC's aren't critical in this context). We figure that we'd want to run some form of Xenix or Unix on the '386. The initial idea was to run nntp on the '386 and use rrn to read the news on the workstations and other machines. Does this make sense? Would it make more sense to try to NFS mount a filesystem from the '386 (this doesn't make any immediate sense, due to potential byte ordering problems in the control files)? Are there any Xenix/Unix's for a '386 that come with nntp, or do we have to port it? Has anyone done this? If we have to do this, where can we get the latest/best version of nntp (and which Xenix/Unix does it run "best" with?). I know there are sites out there on '386 boxes... how do *you* take care of news? I'd appreciate any help anyone can give. Please e-mail replies, and I'll post a summary if anyone is interested. Thanks in advance! -Eric (erf@progress.com) -- ---------- Eric R. Feigenson UUCP: mit-eddie!progress!erf Progress Software Corp. Internet: erf@progress.com 5 Oak Park, Bedford, MA 01730
geof@aurora.com (Geoffrey H. Cooper) (08/07/90)
In article <937@progress.UUCP> erf@progress.UUCP (Eric Feigenson) writes: >The initial idea was to run nntp on the '386 and use rrn to read the >news on the workstations and other machines. Does this make sense? >Would it make more sense to try to NFS mount a filesystem from the '386 >(this doesn't make any immediate sense, due to potential byte ordering >problems in the control files)? Don't know much about rrn, so I can't comment on that. Sounds ideal for what you want to do, since the '386 should have lots of spare cycles. We cross-mount /usr/spool/news on four SPARC's, with the SPARC that has the real /usr/spool/news being used as a regular workstation. The results are extremely good, with good performance on each reading machine and little load on the host machine. - Geof -- geof@aurora.com / aurora!geof@decwrl.dec.com / geof%aurora.com@decwrl.dec.com