news feed over Ethernet: how?

[der Mouse]

In article <166 at leibniz.UUCP>, tpc at leibniz.UUCP (Tom Chmara) writes:
> The Ethernet is another option[:] rlogin(1)ing into the desired feed,
> system(2)ing uucico, and voila, a high-speed feed.

Hm.  This might work, but it will be difficult to persuade rlogin to
run with no escape character (unless you have source).  Or unless your
uucp has a protocol that doesn't expect a completely transparent 8-bit
data path.

> The question:

> I've had time to calm down and think.  The thought I came up with is:
> does anyone on the Net have a better idea than this?  Has anyone
> already handled these problems?  NNTP as I understand it is not
> acceptable, as not ALL the hosts have Ethernet access, and we'd like
> to keep the Ethernetted ones fairly autonomous.

4.3 uucp is capable of running over a TCP connection.  I would hope
that Sun has picked this up by now, but given how sluggish they've been
about some other things (only with 3.5 did Sun get networking features
that Berkeley has had ever since 4.3!), I'm not too optimistic.

NNTP isn't entirely out of the question; some of your feeds can be
NNTP-based without requiring all of them to be.  Personally, I think
NNTP is a Good Thing.

But beware: the nntpxfer in the distribution we got (I don't know
whether it's been improved since; I can't seem to reach anywhere to get
a fresh distribution to check) was horribly inefficient.  I have a much
improved one; someday I'll send it in to Phil....in the meantime,
anyone who wants can get a copy by sending me mail.

					der Mouse

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