Remotely mounted news. What are the strategies?

[Tom Fitzgerald]

jeff at henson.cc.wwu.edu (Jeff Wandling) writes:
>    In order to remotely mount the news (binaries and data) on the clients,
> would it be wise to just mount the entire "/usr" tree, OR mount each of the
> directories used by news, (/usr/lib/news, /usr/local/lib/nn, /usr/spool/news,
> etc...) remotely from henson to each of the clients via NFS.

Here, we've played with the news config so everything's under the /news
hierarchy on the server.

	/news/spool	= /usr/spool/news
	/news/lib	= /usr/lib/news
	/news/newsbin	= /usr/lib/newsbin
	/news/nn/spool	= /usr/spool/nn
	/news/nn/lib	= /usr/local/lib/nn
	etc.

The clients all mount /news as /remote/news.  (They used to mount it as
/news, but then we found out what pwd does when the server is down....).
They install their newsreaders in their local /usr/local/bin directories
just because it's so nice to have the executables local.  Things like
inews are in the /news hierarchy and the newsreaders point to them.  It's
possible to have different inewses for different architectures, but we
haven't had a need for it yet.

If we were running BSD systems here, we might have gone with the standard
directory structure and symlinks.  But SysV.3 no have symlinks, and that's
what we've got.  This setup does work pretty well for us.

---
Tom Fitzgerald   Wang Labs        fitz at wang.com
1-508-967-5278   Lowell MA, USA   ...!uunet!wang!fitz