architecture-independent netnews

[roger davis]

We have a network of Sun/3s and are using NFS to export the filesystems
which hold all of our network news and the software which reads it, posts
it, etc., from our central netnews server to our other Sun/3 machines.

We have recently begun to acquire a number of Sun/4 and Sun/386i machines,
and would like to be able to read and post news articles on these machines
as well. I'm under the (possibly incorrect) impression that our single
news server will not be able to serve multiple architectures because
certain files which are used by various pieces of the netnews software
(e.g., the history file) are stored in a binary format which is not
architecture-independent.

Am I just imagining bogeymen in the dark, or do I really need an XDR
version of netnews? Has anyone done this? We would eventually like to
support not only Suns but other workstations as well.  We do *not* want
multiple news feeds, as that would waste a lot of disk space and cause
confusion to users regarding article numbering, etc.

Any ideas? Elegant solutions? Ugly hacks, even??

Please E-mail replies to me, as I do not normally read certain of the
newsgroups to which I've cross-posted this request. I will be happy to
post a summary of all replies for the benefit of anyone else who may be
perplexed by this problem.

Thanks much.

			Roger Davis
			Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory
			rbd at lamont.ldgo.columbia.edu