chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Cheshire Chuqui) (11/29/84)
The other day I put out a feeler to see whether or not there was interest
in a distributed news system. The response has already been phenomenal, so
I'm going to set up a mailing list to coordinate the discussion and see
whether or not we can put together a design and perhaps get started
implementing it. If you are interested in joining this group and you
haven't already contacted me, please let me know. I'll be creating the list
in a few days and will send out an introductory note to it then.
I'm setting this up as a mailing list because I feel that most of the
volume generated by it will have a limited interest to the general net
readers. We will keep the net informed as we go along and make our designs
available for public comment when we have something concrete, so please
don't ask to join unless you plan on perticipating.
(For those that missed the discussion, we are looking for a news system
that will allow us to store a single copy of the news data base and make it
available to a number of sites over a local area net such as ethernet
transparently to the rest of the network. Peripherally we might look at a
distributed mail system as well.
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!~madden@sdcsvax.UUCP (Jim Madden) (11/29/84)
Please add the address "sdcsvax!distnews" (which will be a local mailing list on the UCSD campus) to your distributed news system mailing list. Parenthetically, I should say that we've found that the IBIS distributed file mechanisms from Purdue can provide a <very> cheap way to share news between 4.2BSD machines across a TCP/IP network. The general news database (spool files, active file, etc.) can be kept on a single 4.2BSD using the straight news (2.10.2) release. Users on other machines (suns, vaxen, pyramids) can read news (using either readnews or rn) by replacing the local spool directory and active files with cross machine symbolic link (supported by the IBIS package.) Some gain in efficiency occurs if you change the names directly in news system .h files rather than relying on the symbolic links. I believe that other user news functions can also be made to work at trivial coding expense. At present, the mechanism relys on the user having accounts on both the reading machine and on the machine with the news directory but a very simple change to create a specail "news" IBIS can eliminate that restriction. There is considerable expense in processing overhead associated with the mechanism since IBIS works by replacing many IO related UNIX system calls with replacement routines (in a library invoked before libc.a) which analyze parameters and perform appropriate cross net handshaking when necessary. Since the processing underlying news reading is largely system calls of this kind the overhead goes up. It seems likely that this extra overhead will exist in any cross system approach that doesn't rely on operating system changes. Jim Madden madden@sdcsvax
jsq@ut-sally.UUCP (John Quarterman) (12/03/84)
The SUN network file system looks, from the advance descriptions,
like it will be a better solution for distributed news (and a lot
of other distributed things) than IBIS. Of course, it *will*
require kernel mods.
(Note I'm referring to SUN's forthcoming network file system,
not their current network disk driver, though that also has its uses.)
--
John Quarterman, CS Dept., University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712 USA
jsq@ut-sally.ARPA, jsq@ut-sally.UUCP, {ihnp4,seismo,ctvax}!ut-sally!jsqrees@apollo.uucp (Jim Rees) (12/06/84)
I had no problem getting our news system to work over our local net. The Apollo file system is already distributed, so no matter where I put the new spool directory, everyone can get at it. We currently have 600 machines with about 1200 users all using the same news spool directory. I didn't have to make any changes to the news software to get this to work. Although not necessary, I did change the message-ID to indicate which machine the article originated on. The second hex number in the message-ID is the node ID (serial number) of the originating machine.