🚀 go-pugleaf

ntmtv!harthc@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Howard Hart) writes:
- >Apart from efficiency the main argument that has been used here
- >against NFS is that news is currently on our gateway machine, and
- >if we ran NFS on that machine it would be a major security hole.
- >I don't know how serious a worry this is.

	The security hole depends upon what is being exported by the
gateway, and what lives between the gateway and the internet.  At
CONVEX, we have a router that is the actual connection to the
internet, and it is very selective about what ports and packets get
through.

- Don't forget that wonderful feature of NFS when partitions are mounted
- read/write (such as the case where you have to mount the news batch
- directory read/write for users to post articles). Don't know about
- other machines, but on Sun's, if you loose the server, the client
- hangs indefinitely (I was told at one time that NFS writes have
- higher interrupt priority than mouse clicks, so I do mean complete
- screen/window lockup).

	We don't mount our news partitions read/write on the client
machines, rather we mount them soft,read-only, and then use NNTP to post
(since we already have NNTP running for the transport.)  This allows
folks to use their favorite tools to interogate articles (grep, cat,
less, etc) while not locking things down to an NFS server.

-                        That alone makes NNTP worthwhile at our site.
- It was very interesting when our old NFS-moounted newsserver went down
- and 300+ machines lab-wide suddenly quit responding--all for a marginally
- (management-wise) supported USENET feed. I'd strongly recommend NNTP-only.

	We have found that the number of NNTP readers used by our
company puts too much of a strain on the NNTP server.  And news is an
internally supported tool, since many projects use news (as well as
UofIll notes) for communication.

	I have no problems recommending the NFS/NNTP mixture, since we
have used it with great success.

	If you don't want or need NNTP, you could always set the
systems up so that posting was done by mail to the server, leaving the
reading via NFS.

-- 
Eric Schnoebelen		eric@cirr.com		schnoebe@convex.com
    The sendmail configuration file is one of those files that looks like
    someone beat their head on the keyboard. After working with it... I
	    can see why! - Harry Skelton (harry@usrgrp)