High-availability inn?

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

I'm ruminating a bit here, but bear with me.

I'm in the process of thinking about moving a news server from one
machine to another, and want to keep the uptime as high as possible.
Of course, I could have it stop accepting new messages, flush all the
files and rsync it over.  But with 30M article files and rather large
history files, that's going to take a while.  I can do the initial
rsync first while it's running as normal, then switch it to
non-spooling mode, and then do the rest, but it's still going to take
quite a bit of time.

So today's random thought is -- would it be possible to run an
instance of inn that would just accept whatever it was fed?  That is,
instead of (I've cheated a bit here and looked in the source code)
having ARTassignnumbers() do it's normal thing, could it just accept
the Xref header assigned by the master news server?

If that were possible, then all the articles on the standby server
would have the same article numbers as the master server.  I could
feed the standby server these messages at leisure, either with an
ad-hoc thing or via a regular news feed.  Then, when the time comes,
I'd just, well, switch the servers.  Nobody would know the difference.

This idea seems so simple that I'm sure there are reasons this
wouldn't work.  :-)

(The other thing this could be used for is that people could set up
"replicated" news servers, and users could connect to the nearest
server for greater speed, and could switch servers at will without
having to do anything but alter the server name.  news.us.gmane.org,
news.au.gmane.org...)
 
-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi at gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen