> Putting a netnews feed into AFS slows service somewhat
Lots, I'd think.
> but gives the advantages of nearly unlimited disk storage
I don't see much difference here. You'll have to have multiple
volumes, which means you'll have to use symlinks for cross-posts
(at least those that cross volume boundaries), and at that point
there's not much difference between AFS and multiple drives. I
suppose it might make a difference if your news spool is so big
you must use multiple file servers, but that's pretty insane.
> dynamic quota management
Who cares?
> nightly backup
If anybody actually wanted to back the stuff up, and I find that
hard to believe, they don't need AFS to do nightly backups.
> and enhanced fault tolerance.
Until WWW came along, our management was pretty nutso about news
service, but nobody ever suggested making any significant invest-
ment in fault tolerance. Like most sites, I would suspect, our
plan is simply to restart the spool area from zero if necessary.
> To circumvent the callback problem, we use a very large local cache on
> the news server (-files 64000). This lets us keep the latest couple of
> days worth of articles cached locally, ready for quick retrieval.
If you consider 64,000 files to be several days worth, you must be
running far short of a full feed -- we're seeing close to 500,000
articles per week now, which considering the weekend lull probably
means weekdays are approaching 80,000 articles. Total cross-posts
(counting an article posted to three newsgroups as two cross-posts)
was at about 17% a year or so ago, so in the worst case (every group
is a different volume) you'd have over 90,000 files per day.
> Subdividing news hierarchies across AFS volumes works as follows (using
> C-NEWS):
>
> - /usr/spool/news is a symbolic link into AFS
...
> - /usr/spool/news/in.coming is a symbolic link back to the local disk.
> This lets incoming news spool into a local disk directory, unimpeded by
> AFS.
Since /usr/spool/news is a symlink into AFS, there's at least one
directory step through AFS which (minorly) impedes incoming news.
> (When AFS is unavailable, incoming news accumulates in a local disk
> directory for later processing).
Not according to what you outlined above.
--
Karl Swartz |INet [EMAIL PROTECTED]
SLAC Computing Services | or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
1-415/926-3630 |UUCP uunet!lll-winken!unixhub!kls -or- ditka!kls
(SLAC and the US Dept. of Energy don't necessarily agree with my opinions.)
