jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) (02/11/88)
This article was originally in news.software.b, but it's really a news administration issue, so I'm directing followups there. In article <484@wa3wbu.UUCP> john@wa3wbu.UUCP (John Gayman) writes: > > I'm currently attempting to have two systems feed me News. Is this >advisable and if so, how can I set up my "sys" file so that all the news >I get from each site doesn't get forwarded to the other site ? I put >the "L" flag on the one feed but it looks like I never saw any of the >News that came in last night. Any ideas ??? There are many advantages to doing this. But I wouldn't advise it unless you want to consider your feeds as being two-way. That is: nei-a <----> wa3wbu <----> nei-b Remember that news will never transmit articles to a site if that site name already appears in the Path. Because of this, this system provides redundancy at low cost. If nei-b has problems, you'll get all your news from nei-a. If both are operating, and you contact your neighbors frequently, there won't be a whole lot of duplication, because a given article will arrive from nei-a and you'll pass it on to nei-b before nei-b attempts to send it to you. You'll also be supplying extra redundancy for your two neighbors in case one of their feeds goes down, so you're doing them a service. To set this up, write your sys file as if you were passing both nei-a and nei-b a full feed. If you have only these two neighbors, the total volume of outgoing articles will be equivalent to one full feed, and the total number of incoming articles will probably be around 1.5 feeds, less if you contact your neighbors frequently. Quite a few news nodes in this area are set up that way -- chains of sites with two-way feeds, with leaf nodes hanging off the sides of the chains here and there. It definitely increases reliability. -- - Joe Buck {uunet,ucbvax,sun,<smart-site>}!epimass.epi.com!jbuck Old Internet mailers: jbuck%epimass.epi.com@uunet.uu.net