FAQ Questions?

[divya at avnika.com]

Hi all,

Here are some questions that I have that should probably be in the FAQ.

(1) I would like to know if there is a way to do something more granular:

 How do I feed all articles in a given hierarchy from one server to
 another? For example, if I wanted to just have all the articles in
 the newsgroups under comp.lang.* fed from one server to another, what
 is the best way to do so?

This is refinement of the question http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/inn.html#S6.4,

(2) How do I change article storage without breaking article numbering
 or having to re-initialize the server?

 I have grown to dislike the storage of articles in tradspool formats.
 This is because we would rather not expire intranet/private/local
 groups or have an insanely long article retention policy (like 4 years).
 Even for intranet groups, this means 40-100K articles. In tradspool,
 this means 40-100K little files in a single directory which I suspect
 is not conducive to performance.

 So, what I'd like to be able to do is to take those newsgroups that are
 stored in tradspool and move them into a CNFS container. I suspect that
 it'd be helpful to some to go the reverse route as well.

(3) Is there a way to use MAIL as a transport for news replication/feeds?

 Perhaps this is an esoteric question, but I have often wondered if
 mail could be used as a transport for articles between servers. I know
 that we have "imapfeed" so why not a "mailfeed".

 This is useful in those cases where port 119 is not open between a
 company intranet and an externally resident Usenet peer. Establishing 
 a mail based peer feed may be a viable option.

(4) How do I mark a newsgroup as read only?

 I didn't understand the readers.conf documentation well enough here.
 Basically, if I want to "discourage" the use of a group because it is
 to be retired from an intranet hierarchy, I'd like to be able to mark
 it as read only and let the articles expire. Then we can rmgroup them
 manually. This is handy when trying to perform newsgroup cleanup and 
 streamlining.

(5) Is there any way to disallow non-plain-text articles?

 Although I don't agree with it totally, many users bitterly complain
 about users who use Outlook or Netscape/Mozilla news readers often post
 in HTML format. I agree that is bad netiquette, but don't care much about
 implementing filters to block that traffic. However, should the neec arise
 to do so, what approach would be the best?

(6) Backups of CNFS Buffers?

 Is there a way to temporary throttle the news server, make a backup 
 copy of the CNFS buffers and then unthrottle the news servers? This 
 would allow me to take a snapshot of the news server for backup 
 purposes.

 What other data do I need to back up so that I can restore the system
 to this last known good state at a later time?

(7) Are CNFS buffers portable? Can I take CNFS buffer from my Linux
 system and SCP it over to a Solaris SPARC system and expect them to be
 usable? WHat are the limitations?

Thanks for reading this far. I'd like to see if we can discuss these 
topics and perhaps update the FAQ with them.

Regards

Divya Sundaram