pc@ukc.UUCP (R.P.A.Collinson) (11/24/84)
Consider the following: An installation consists of several machines connected by a local area network. The installation wishes to be known by one public name and does not want to emit news and mail marked with the internal names of machines. The news system is driven by one machine which can have two names - one internal and one external. Problem: News is processor based and inserts local machine names when news items are submitted. News items are identified by the processor name and an article id. Question: Has anyone come up (or wanted to come up) with a solution. I want to allow the users of local processors to initiate and reply to news but without external sites seeing any name other than ukc. Comment: Solutions to this problem and related issues with mail are going to become increasingly important. In general, I neither wish or need to know which processor in a local area network is being used by a particular person today, local routing should cope. Current practice with mailers and the news system make local machines visible - when a simpler installation address should suffice. Peter Collinson mcvax!ukc!pc
chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Cheshire Chuqui) (11/27/84)
I've been looking (in my copious free time) at the problems of running a
distributed news system (specifically on a 4.2 system, but looking for a
generic answer to LAN's) for a while. I haven't made too much headway, but
I'd be interested in discussing this further with interested parties. We
may have enough going to set up a mailing list to try to put together a
design and perhaps in implementation. This is definitely going to be of
growing importance-- I don't want to slog megabytes of news all over my
ethernet and I don't want people forced to rlogin to the vax for their
news.
If you are interested, drop me a line.
chuq
--
From the center of a Plaid pentagram: Chuq Von Rospach
{cbosgd,decwrl,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA
~But you know, monsieur, that as long as she wears the claw of the dragon
upon her breast you can do nothing-- her soul belongs to me!~gnu@sun.uucp (John Gilmore) (11/28/84)
I've also been thinking about the problems of running news transparently over a net. At Sun we currently rlogin to 'sun' to deal with news. My best idea so far is to run /usr/spool/news as a network file system and let users on any machine mount it read-only, running the current vnews/readnews/rn. However, inews should be run via rpc or rsh to the server to avoid race conditions in database updates.
mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (11/30/84)
We use remote filesystems here on our Suns to avoid multiple copies. cbhydra (a Sun 170 fileserver) has /usr/spool/news and /usr/lib/news on the /pub filesystem, with appropriate symbolic links so they appear to be in /usr/spool/news and /usr/lib/news. /pub is mounted read only on the workstations and we can read news from either of them. We run the same binaries, which are also accessed over the net. inews is handled by having /usr/lib/news/inews on the fileserver by a shell script that rsh's it onto cbosgd - that way we hide the Suns and all news (like this article) appears to come from cbosgd. Works fine, as long as cbhydra and cbosgd are up. rnews is a link to /usr/lib/news/iinews, since inews itself is a shell script. There does turn out to be a problem here. vnews has a huge artfile that it keeps lots of info in. If you're reading vnews on a workstation and news is coming into the fileserver at the same time, the buffer cache on the workstation will be out of date, and you'll see an inconsistent artfile on the workstation (some blocks will be up to date and others won't.) I don't see a nice solution to this, and I don't know if NFS will solve it. Also, I understand there is a news server being developed experimentally at Berkeley. Mark
schoff@cadtroy.UUCP (Martin Lee Schoffstall) (12/02/84)
> I've also been thinking about the problems of running news > transparently over a net. At Sun we currently rlogin to 'sun' to deal > with news. My best idea so far is to run /usr/spool/news as a network > file system and let users on any machine mount it read-only, running > the current vnews/readnews/rn. However, inews should be run via rpc or > rsh to the server to avoid race conditions in database updates. This is very similar to what we have done at CADMUS for the last year. We have the news database machine mounted say as /NEWS which is then put in the /etc/passwd entry as user "news"'s login directory. Everything works really well while doing "readnews". inews is the problem. It would seem to me that someone could change inews such that you could run inews on another machine. This handle would be system distribution specific, SUN would use their RPC, CADMUS would use their RPC etc... marty {wivax,linus,bbncca,seismo}!cadmus!schoff USENET-LAND schoff@cadmusv.ARPA ARPA-LAND
joe@fluke.UUCP (Joe Kelsey) (12/03/84)
I have already replied personally to this article, but I just can't resist yet another opportunity to plug my favorite modification of the news system. I have modified news ever since 2.9 (!) so that it "hides" the local system name of whatever local network you happen to have running (way back in 2.9 days we were running Jerknet, now we have a "real" Ethernet...). Anyway, the idea is to hide all of those horrible local system names since they just clutter up the path and confus everyone anyway. The only real use for them is in generating Message-ID's anyway... So, here is what you do: pick a domain name that you want to hide behind. Here we use "fluke", which is the name our uucp machine identifies itself as to the outside world (internally it is known as "vax4"). Then, apply these patches, and all machines you run news on will identify themselves as this machine, except in Message-IDs and responses to certain control messages. You also need to hack sendmail.cf or whatever your mail delivery agen tis so that the mail system also cooperates in hiding the grungy details from the outside world, but this is quite easily done with a master alias database and a few changes here and there to sendmail.cf. I have posted these changes several times in the past, and I will post them again and again until they finally get installed in an "official" version of the news software. I encourage everyone who has a local network with imaginative names like vax1, vax2, vax3, or pucc-a, pucc-b, pucc-d, or hoxyz1, hoxyz2 to consider this scheme. I think that wider use of this kind of system could prevent machnie names like "x" at CRDS from leaking out onto the network again. It will also help tremendously in the UUCP directory since then you won't have to worry so much about how many unique characters you need, since you only have to register your gateway name and can call your other machines anything you want to! /Joe
ka@cbosgd.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist) (12/07/84)
The only network file system that I have seen running on the Sun worked by replacing the standard disk driver with a driver that read from a remote disk across the Ethernet. This approach will not work on a file system (like /usr/spool/news) which is subject to modification. In order to run vnews across a network you need something like the Newcastle Connection, which intercepts system calls and sends them over the network. Kenneth Almquist