🚀 go-pugleaf

> >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.

If you mean it's your Internet gateway, you might want to block all NFS
traffic from coming through your router.  This would be a good idea in
any case.

ntmtv!harthc@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Howard Hart) writes:

> 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).

You _really_ don't want to use NFS for posting.  Locks don't work right and
all sorts of bad things can happen.  It works fine using NFS to read and
NNTP to post.  This also eliminates one of the major problems with reading
via NNTP, having a separate nntpd process using up RAM for each user
reading news.

> 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).

Could you explain this a little further?  There's no such thing as an NFS
write interrupt, and I have a very hard time believing that the Sun sits
there in the ethernet driver with interrupts disabled waiting for the NFS
response packet to arrive.  Yes, if you hard-mount the disk, any attempt
to read it will hang until the server comes up, but there's no reason to
hard-mount a news partition.

There are other arguments against NNTP for reading.  While NNTP and NFS use
comparable amounts of CPU on the server (as far as I can tell), NNTP
requires a separate daemon process for each reader, which chews up your
physical memory.  A fixed number of nfsd processes can support any number
of readers.  Second, if people are reading news via NNTP when the server or
the net goes down, their newsreaders generally exit rudely, losing whatever
variables, filenames, etc they've modified during the session.  With NFS,
they can leave the newsreader running (but hung) and start re-reading
immediately when the server comes back up.

My worst problem with using NFS for reading news is that I can't tell who's
reading news at any given time, so I can't tell who out of the 200 possible
users need to be warned if the server is coming down.  At least with NNTP
you've got a netstat display.  I don't think this is a big enough problem to
switch over to NNTP.

> I'd strongly recommend NNTP-only.

I'd recommend NFS for reading, news soft-mounted read-only, NNTP for
posting.

-- 
Tom Fitzgerald   Wang Labs       fitz@wang.com   "I went to the universe today;
1-508-967-5278   Lowell MA, USA                   It was closed...."