architecture-independent netnews

[trinkle at cs.purdue.edu]

To my knowledge there is only one file that is non-portable -- that is the
history (DBM) file.  Everything else is character.  We use one NFS server
for our news machines and every other machine in the department (big and
little endian) can access news.  The only thing I had to do was write a
special slave version of inews that does some very basic preliminary
preparation and then does and rsh to the news server (as "news") and
invokes the real inews.  There may be a usable version of such an inews
program in the current news distribution.  The earlier version did not do
anything like what we wanted it to do.

There is a real directory for news (/usr/spool/news/lib) that is used as
the news home on the news server.  Every other machine has a local news
home with symlinks for the active, aliases, distributions, mailpaths, and
newsgroup files that point to /usr/spool/news/lib.  There is also a real
(slave) version of inews and caesar in the local directory.  Nothing on
the slave machine needs to refer to the history file, so there is nothing
machine dependent about it.

A beneficial side effect of this is that article numbers are consistent
everywhere, so you only need one .newsrc anywhere in the department to
keep things consistent.

Daniel Trinkle			trinkle at cs.purdue.edu
Dept. of Computer Sciences	{backbone}!purdue!trinkle
Purdue University		317-494-7844
West Lafayette, IN 47907