dyer@wivax.UUCP (09/02/83)
I haven't been following the discussion on 'net.news', so bear with
me if this has been discussed before.
We're bringing up UUCP and Netnews at BBN ("Who needs USENET--we've
got the ARPAnet?") and the problem of providing access to the netnews
database across more than 25 machines has appeared. It's silly to
have to duplicate a two-megabyte database across all these machines
(their populations are pretty homogeneous, so limiting subscriptions
to newsgroups isn't feasible.)
Certainly, others have come across this problem. Perhaps some have
even solved it? Since all our machines are hooked up on our internal
ARPAnet-like network, I thought that some sort of "news server" on a
central machine would do the trick. "Readnews" or "vnews" would make
a TCP connection to the net-server host, and pass articles to the user
on demand. Are there any sites hooked together with a local network
which have tried something along these lines? (Or along any other lines?)
If I get no positive response, I'll put something together over the
next month, and make it available to the net.
Thanks,
Steve Dyer
decvax!wivax!dyer
sdyer@bbn-unix