One Feeder, Multiple Readers ...

[Marc G. Fournier]

Evening all ...

	Have a client that wants to setup a *very* large news server ...
he's running on a MAN, and its primary purpose is to service the various
ISPs connecting to that MAN ...

	Now, I've recommended that he setup one Feeder box, no overview
records, to handle th eincoming feeds, and then use several Reader boxes
in a pseudo-round robin t handle the readers (expecting >600 simultaneous
connections, supposedly) ...

	Now, one of the things he's come up with is using a "disk array"
with an external SCSI controller, and having two+ computers connecting
through the SCSI bus, and letting SCSI locking handle things ... its new
tech to me, so don't know enough either direction about it ...

	My first thought is on a read-only system, that shoudl work ...
but the readers have to get the articles from somewhere, and write to the
disk ...

	He's thought was then to connect the feeder to the array also, so
that it has a write-lock on the device, whiel the readers can do a read
lock on it ...

	So, first question ... does this even make any sense?  I can see
it working for fail-over between two computers, but for news reading on
both computers simultaneously?

	My thought was to go with something like a NetApp, instead of a
SCSI bus, to do pretty much the same thing ... Feeder writes to NetApp,
Readers are setup so that they read from NetApp and Post through Feeder
... should eliminate any NFS-Locking issues, no?

	Thoughts on either solution?  suggestion of a third possible?

Thanks ...