High-availability inn?

[Sylvain Robitaille]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen wrote:

> So today's random thought is -- would it be possible to run an
> instance of inn that would just accept whatever it was fed?  ...
>
> If that were possible, then all the articles on the standby server
> would have the same article numbers as the master server.

The inn.conf manual page offers the following, which I believe describes
what you're trying to do:

       xrefslave
           Whether to act as the slave of another server.  If
           set, INN attempts to duplicate exactly the article
           numbering of the server feeding it by looking at the
           Xref: header of incoming articles and assigning the
           same article numbers to articles as was noted in the
           Xref: header from the upstream server.  The result is
           that clients should be able to point at either server
           interchangeably (using some load balancing scheme, for
           example) and see the same internal article numbering.
           ...

This is how I handled setting up a system to replace my old news server,
while ensuring that my users wouldn't need to deal with article
renumbering issues.  It seems to have worked well.

> (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...)

Xrefslave will definitely provide for that, as long as the "near"
servers all make sure to hand articles posted via them to the same
"master" news server.

-- 
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Sylvain Robitaille                              syl at alcor.concordia.ca

Systems analyst / Newsmaster                      Concordia University
Instructional & Information Technology        Montreal, Quebec, Canada
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