reggers@UWOVAX.UWO.CA (Reg Quinton) (09/27/89)
On Tue, 26 Sep 89 10:09:02 EST, Geoff Huston <munnari!csc.anu.oz.au!gih900%UUNET.UU.NET@VM1.NoDak.EDU> said: >VAXnotes does not have to rebuild a tree into a list: as all postings within a >conference occur on the node hosting that conference there is a unique time >order of postings into the conference. USENET does not have that ability. Well, various USENET implementations can/will do this. Imagine a scenario where everyone accesses uunet.uu.net across the IPnet using NNTP (say from rrn, or vnews, or etc.) to interactively read/post articles. The sequential ordering on this central server would be exactly what our VaxNote colleague is after. Of course this is a really dumb way of doing things (can you imagine the 6,000+ sites on Usenet interactively banging away on uunet? It would kill the Internet as well as the server). And, even if the world where one big Decnet ;-( VaxNotes and Decnet couldn't handle it either. This strategy *is*, however, a reasonable way to do things on a LAN or campus network. The NNTP implementation on ANU/NEWS is quite a bit different from that for rrn, vnews, etc. in as much as they interact with the remote server when you run them and they don't need a local data base (other than a pointer to the server). With ANU/NEWS NNTP is only used as a transport mechanism to update a distributed data-base (well not quite but the point is there are nightly runs required to synchronize two data bases -- these other implementations don't do that at all). There are, of course, Usenet implementations for Vax/VMS which use NNTP to interact with a remote server (typically a Unix machine) that don't require a local data base, synchronization, etc. as is the case for ANU/NEWS but these are going to require that you have an IPnet implementation.