This is straying slightly from the topic of AFS, but...
Excerpts from dl.info-afs: 22-Nov-94 Re: news server in AFS? "Michael
Niksch"@zurich. (1005*)
> > Marc Unangst says:
> > [That there is no point to running news in AFS space and many reasons
> > not to]
> >
> > I very strongly agree.
> I disagree. Maybe it is a bad idea to have CLIENTS access news from AFS
> space. On the other hand, it has always been a ridiculous idea to push
> ALL news to an NNTP server, whether they will ever be read or not. Or
> news service has more or less died because INN doesn't manage to
> transfer articles across the Atlantic as fast as they appear.
This is most likely a latency problem, not a throughput problem. NNTP
protocol "streaming" should help combat this (once it is finalized), but
in the meantime, latency problems can be easily worked around. How many
channels do you have between you and your NNTP feed?
> If a master in the US would put provide news in AFS space, we could run
> a local NNTP 'slave' server with a big cache. The slave server would
> only pull the articles someone actually wants to read, while it would
> still have all articles virtually available to the user.
I don't see how this makes any sense. If a master in the U.S. put news
in AFS space, you would become what is referred to in Usenet jargon as
an "end node"--you would not be able to provide a newsfeed to anyone
else. If this is acceptable to you, why don't you simply find a NNTP
*client* server right now? Something that "only pulls the articles
someone actually wants to read, but still makes all articles available
to the user" is the *definition* of an NNTP client. At the very least,
this is easier than trying to convince some site in the U.S. why jumping
through a lot of hoops to put their news spool into AFS space is a good
idea. (You wouldn't convince me; I still don't think it's a good idea.)
[If this thread continues to stray away from the topic of AFS I will
take it solely to email.]
James
