🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BuDI5v.2zH@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> fitz@wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald) writes:
>[...]  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.

Is this necessarily true?  It doesn't seem to be the case with rn/trn... sure,
it exits, but it writes out my newsrc, etc., before it does as far as I can
tell.  

>With NFS,
>they can leave the newsreader running (but hung) and start re-reading
>immediately when the server comes back up.

I think whether or not this is a good argument for NFS vs. NNTP depends
a lot on how frequently your newsserver goes down.  ;-)

>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.

Also, it is very easy to customize NNTP to give you all sorts of statistics
with regard to news usage.

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

I think one very important argument that has been left out of this whole
discussion is the question of availability of NFS on different platforms.
Sure you _can_ get NFS for most platforms, but on personal computers it
may not be the best choice.  On the other hand the simplicity of NNTP makes
it very easy to implement clients for any platform that has a TCP/IP
implementation, making it much more universal.  Newsreaders have recently
appeared for Macs and PCs, some of them quite good.

Of course using NNTP does not preclude using NFS as well where it's
available and appropriate.  My sense from a system management viewpoint
would to support NNTP first, and then give an NFS mount to anyone who
has the capability and wants the greater flexibility that NFS provides.
--
Jurgen Botz                  |   Internet: JBotz@mtholyoke.edu
Academic Systems Consultant  |     Bitnet: JBotz@mhc.bitnet
Mount Holyoke College        |      Voice: (US) 413-538-2375 (daytime)
South Hadley, MA, USA        | Snail Mail: J. Botz, 01075-0629