Bob [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>Putting a netnews feed into AFS slows service somewhat, but gives the
>advantages of nearly unlimited disk storage, dynamic quota management,
>nightly backup and enhanced fault tolerance.
Unlimited disk storage: Probably an advantage, but only "unlimited" in
that you can easily spread your news spool over multiple
servers/disks. If you're already buying big disks for news, you might
as well put them on the local server.
Quota management: Who cares? You're going to give individual
newsgroups or heirarchies quotas? What's the news software going to
do when the quota runs out, automatically run expire?
Nightly backup: If you waste tape backing up netnews, you clearly have
too much money or tape. I mean, it's all going to go away in a couple
days anyway...
Enhanced fault tolerance: Well, okay, but most news outages are caused
by transmission problems, not disk failures. And netnews is fairly
low on most organizations' list of priorities.
On the other hand, I'd say that putting news spool in AFS space is a
real good way of killing network performance (especially if the AFS
server with the spool volumes isn't the same machine as the news
server) and netnews performance. INN tries very hard to only write
the article to disk once, since disk performance is the major
bottleneck in handling news. I would think that reducing disk
performance more by putting the news spool on AFS could only reduce
performance, with no visible gains.
The only advantage I could see is to use AFS ACLs to restrict
newsgroup readership, but that would require readers to read via AFS
rather than NNTP. And there are other ways to restrict readership
(i.e., the new AUTHINFO GENERIC authentication protocol for INN) which
don't require you to take a huge performance hit in the filesystem.
-Marc Unangst
(not speaking for CMU)
