rbd%lamont@uunet.uu.net (roger davis) (06/13/89)
We have a network of Sun/3s and are using NFS to export the filesystems which hold all of our network news and the software which reads it, posts it, etc., from our central netnews server to our other Sun/3 machines. We have recently begun to acquire a number of Sun/4 and Sun/386i machines, and would like to be able to read and post news articles on these machines as well. I'm under the (possibly incorrect) impression that our single news server will not be able to serve multiple architectures because certain files which are used by various pieces of the netnews software (e.g., the history file) are stored in a binary format which is not architecture-independent. Am I just imagining bogeymen in the dark, or do I really need an XDR version of netnews? Has anyone done this? We would eventually like to support not only Suns but other workstations as well. We do *not* want multiple news feeds, as that would waste a lot of disk space and cause confusion to users regarding article numbering, etc. Any ideas? Elegant solutions? Ugly hacks, even?? Please E-mail replies to me, as I do not normally read certain of the newsgroups to which I've cross-posted this request. I will be happy to post a summary of all replies for the benefit of anyone else who may be perplexed by this problem. Thanks much. Roger Davis Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory rbd@lamont.ldgo.columbia.edu
trinkle@cs.purdue.edu (06/14/89)
To my knowledge there is only one file that is non-portable -- that is the
history (DBM) file. Everything else is character. We use one NFS server
for our news machines and every other machine in the department (big and
little endian) can access news. The only thing I had to do was write a
special slave version of inews that does some very basic preliminary
preparation and then does and rsh to the news server (as "news") and
invokes the real inews. There may be a usable version of such an inews
program in the current news distribution. The earlier version did not do
anything like what we wanted it to do.
There is a real directory for news (/usr/spool/news/lib) that is used as
the news home on the news server. Every other machine has a local news
home with symlinks for the active, aliases, distributions, mailpaths, and
newsgroup files that point to /usr/spool/news/lib. There is also a real
(slave) version of inews and caesar in the local directory. Nothing on
the slave machine needs to refer to the history file, so there is nothing
machine dependent about it.
A beneficial side effect of this is that article numbers are consistent
everywhere, so you only need one .newsrc anywhere in the department to
keep things consistent.
Daniel Trinkle trinkle@cs.purdue.edu
Dept. of Computer Sciences {backbone}!purdue!trinkle
Purdue University 317-494-7844
West Lafayette, IN 47907