watcher@athena.mit.edu (chris ross) (08/23/89)
Having cleared away the last of the bureaucratic red tape, I'm finally able to install the Usenet software on the Apollo ring at my work- place. I'd like to learn of other people's experiences with Apollo news sites, and will post a summary of replies. Specifically, I'm looking for answers to the following questions: Where did you acquire the basic news software? Did you start with vanilla Unix B news and customize it, or use someone else's? What Apollo-specific issues does your version address? Likewise for rn and friends -- what special hacks are required? Are you running news in a mixed SR9-SR10 network? If so, what do you feel are the key issues? Do you have separate source versions for SR9 and SR10? Howbout C news -- anyone have a *stable* Apollo port? Is this beginning to sound like an exam yet? :-) As an aside: I know this has been discussed before, but... how many find the Apollo-supplied sendmail adequate? If you have a custom version, what have you changed? Replies to any of the above questions (or on related issues), at any level of detail, are greatly appreciated. I'll try to put out a summary in two or three weeks, with a followup if necessary. FYI: we have about 220 nodes in three internets. Most run SR9.7; a handful are at 9.6 or 10.1. About 30% should be at 10.1 by the time we enter Usenet. Our link with the outside world is via uucp to uunet. thanx for any info you can provide. _____________________________________ chris ross <0> watcher@athena.mit.edu
dclemans@mentor.com (Dave Clemans @ APD x1292) (08/23/89)
The big problem you see with the news software on Apollos (provided you set it up so that all the Apollo nodes look like one big "pseudo" machine, which is what most people I've heard of have done) is that the Usenet software expects standard Unix file locking semantics, that is no locking at all. Apollo's enforce exclusive file write access across a network. We run Cnews as the Usenet "transport" service. I didn't have any real problems in bringing the recent release of Cnews up; it's been quite stable. Note that if you compile Cnews as a Sys5 program you WANT to use one of the public domain dbm library emulators; what the Cnews build script gives you by default to replace the standard dbm libraries is an extremely slow sequential search. I have all the "standard" news reading programs up; readnews, vnews, rn and vn. To work around the file locking problems they actually read an "active.copy" file instead of "active". "active.copy" is updated from "active" every 15 minutes by a cron job that runs on our mail/news gateway node. rn was also modified to not hold the active file continually open (which would prevent active.copy from being updated from active...) I tried once to compile nn (under sys5) but it had problems with hanging after reading one character. I haven't had time to look at it to see why, or to try to compile it instead as a bsd program. Dave Clemans Mentor Graphics
dennis@peanuts.nosc.mil (Dennis Cottel) (08/25/89)
dclemans@mentor.com (Dave Clemans @ APD x1292) writes: > I tried once to compile nn (under sys5) but it had problems with hanging > after reading one character. I haven't had time to look at it to see why, > or to try to compile it instead as a bsd program. Under SR9.7, NN compiles and runs fine as a BSD4.2 program (not counting a couple of makefile problems). We are only using NNTP to a non-Apollo news server and not the full news setup. Dennis Cottel Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego, CA 92152 (619) 553-1645 dennis@nosc.MIL sdcsvax!noscvax!dennis