How bad of an idea is news /spool on NFS?

[Nigel Reed]

In my quest to slurp in a bunch of old articles, my current disk space
offering isn't going to cut it but I have a great deal on a storage
server that's 1-2ms ping from my news server.

The question is, how bad would it be to NFS mount or sshfs mount the
spool directory rather than have it on the same system? I'm using
tradspool and will be using a ZFS file system on the remote side.

I'd hate to have to move the news server since then I'd have to get all
my peers to change the IP addresses for my server.

Thanks,
Nigel

--
End Of The Line BBS - Plano, TX
telnet endofthelinebbs.com 23

[Jesse Rehmer]

On Jan 23, 2024 at 9:06:43 PM CST, "Nigel Reed" <sy...@endofthelinebbs.com>
wrote:

> In my quest to slurp in a bunch of old articles, my current disk space
> offering isn't going to cut it but I have a great deal on a storage
> server that's 1-2ms ping from my news server.
>
> The question is, how bad would it be to NFS mount or sshfs mount the
> spool directory rather than have it on the same system? I'm using
> tradspool and will be using a ZFS file system on the remote side.
>
> I'd hate to have to move the news server since then I'd have to get all
> my peers to change the IP addresses for my server.
>
> Thanks,
> Nigel

I used NFS as the underlying storage for a spool a long time ago, but it was
with CNFS buffers. Assuming you have stable networking between the hosts and
the NFS mount doesn't disappear or hang, you likely won't have any issues, but
tradspool may be much slower performance-wise over NFS.

[Adam W.]

Nigel Reed <sy...@endofthelinebbs.com> wrote:

> I'd hate to have to move the news server since then I'd have to get all
> my peers to change the IP addresses for my server.

One alternative solution (I don't know if better or worse, but probably
better) would be to move the server, but redirect your peers on the
current IP (both sides, so they won't see any change on their side).

It can be done temporarily too. Just do the redirect and change your DNS.
Peers should switch to a new IP automatically overnight (if they use DNS
instead of static IP, which they should).

The only thing you'll have to monitor then would be your outgoing spool,
as when peers switch to your new IP, you'll have to modify your outgoing
IP (start connecting to them from your new IP, because they will disallow
streaming on the old one).

[Jesse Rehmer]

When moving to a new server/IP address what I typically do is configure a feed
from the original server to the new server before changing the DNS record to
point to the new IP. Then you will have something feeding the new server
immediately.

A few days after changing the IP in DNS I check if peers are still connecting
to the original server and reach out to them directly. There are a few news
admins who use IP addresses instead of DNS, in the last move I did, I think
only one peer was still configuring that way.

[Nigel Reed]

Thanks. I decided to just use the new server and get my peers, if any
are using IP, to update once I have pulled in all the news that I am
going grab. It's going to be pretty slow, I have 17GB using pullnews
after about 9 hours.

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi Jesse,

> When moving to a new server/IP address what I typically do is configure a feed
> from the original server to the new server before changing the DNS record to
> point to the new IP. Then you will have something feeding the new server
> immediately.

That's smoother, indeed, and what I also do when moving my server.

> There are a few news
> admins who use IP addresses instead of DNS, in the last move I did, I think
> only one peer was still configuring that way.

I also saw the case of a news server behind a firewall. Incoming and
outgoing connections were no longer accepted after a change of IP, and a
manual intervention was necessary.

--
Julien ÉLIE

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