🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Bu8pDC.HJ5@ux1.isu.edu> axs@cs.bham.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman) writes:
>simmdan@ux1.isu.edu = ted@telematics.com (Ted Goldblatt) writes:
>
>> Date: 4 Sep 92 21:53:59 GMT
>> Sender: simmdan@ux1.isu.edu (Daniel Simmons)
>> Organization: Telematics Intl., Inc.; Ft. Lauderdale, FL
>
>> Is it the sense of the net (:-)) that having the news server
>> feed the news readers via nntp is preferable to feeding via
>> (read only) exported NFS filesystems, or vice versa?
>
>One problem with nntp is that it provides only a limited set of ways
>of accessing the news directories. For some users it is important to
>be able to apply any Unix utility (e.g. grep) to news files. Cross
>mounting disks via NFS makes this possible.
>
>Also it is very easy to tailor an editor to be a news reader when
>news directories and articles are available as standard directories
>and files. It is a lot more work to make them use NNTP.
>
>My colleagues here believe that using NFS would provide a far
>heavier compute load on the news server than using NNTP. I don't
>really believe this but have not been able to do any comparisons.

We used to read news from a remote site using NNTP client-server,
and one deficiency in the NNTP protocol was very apparent.
In rrn, when listing article titles in a newsgroup, or asking to
read the first article in a group, there was a long delay (with periods
marching across the screen) while the NNTP client was interrogating
the server to see if the next article exists.  The protocol apparently
had no way for the server to tell the client the number of the first
article in a group.

The problem is not as great in an ethernet environment, but it does
add to the network load.  We now have our own news server, and we
service news clients two ways:  NNTP only, and NFS for reading with
NNTP for posting.  The latter seems to be more efficient, but I haven't
tried to measure the difference in impact on the server.

-- 
Bob Fillmore, Technical Services Division          email: fillmore@emr.ca
  Information Management Branch,                   BIX:   bfillmore      
  Energy, Mines, & Resources Canada                Voice: (613) 992-2832
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