NAME¶
ninpaths - Report Usenet Path: statistics (new inpaths)
SYNOPSIS¶
ninpaths -p -d dumpfile
ninpaths -r site -u dumpfile [
-u
dumpfile ...]
-v level
DESCRIPTION¶
This is an efficient and space-saving
inpaths reporting program. It works
as follows: you feed it the Path: lines via an INN channel feed or some other
similar method, and from time to time the program writes all its internal
counters accumulated so far to a dump file. Another instance of the program
picks up all the dump files, adds them up and formats them into the report.
The purpose of the final report is to summarize the frequency of occurrence of
sites in the Path: headers of articles.
Some central sites accumulate the Path: data from many news servers running this
program or one like it, and then report statistics on the most frequently seen
news servers in Usenet article Path: lines. The
sendinpaths script can
be run daily to mail the accumulated statistics to such a site and remove the
old dump files.
You can get a working setup by doing the following:
- 1.
- Create a directory at pathlog/path (replacing pathlog here
and in all steps that follow with the full path to your INN log
directory). Do not change the name of the "path" subdirectory
because it is used by sendinpaths.
- 2.
- Set up a channel feed using an entry like:
inpaths!:*:Tc,WP:<pathbin>/ninpaths -p -d <pathlog>/path/inpaths.%d
if your version of INN supports "WP" (2.0 and later all do).
Replace <pathbin> with the full path to your INN binaries directory,
and <pathlog> with the full path to your INN log directory.
Note that the naming convention of the generated inpaths dump files should
not be changed. sendinpaths explicitly searches files whose name
starts with "inpaths." in the <pathlog>/path
directory.
- 3.
- Run the following command to start logging these statistics:
ctlinnd reload newsfeeds 'inpaths feed setup'
- 4.
- Enter into your news user crontab these two lines:
6 6 * * * <pathbin>/ctlinnd flush inpaths!
10 6 * * * <pathbin>/sendinpaths
(the actual time doesn't matter). This will force ninpaths to
generate a dump file once a day. Then, a few minutes later,
sendinpaths collects the dumps, makes a report, sends the collected
statistics, and deletes the old dumps.
Note that you can manually generate a report without mailing it, and without
deleting processed dump files, with "sendinpaths -n". Another
useful command is "sendinpaths -c" so as to receive a copy of
the e-mail sent by sendinpaths and therefore make sure that
everything is properly set.
- 5.
- In a couple of days, check that your daily statistics properly appear in
<http://top1000.anthologeek.net/>.
OPTIONS¶
- -d dumpfile
- Save dumps in dumpfile. Any %d in dumpfile will be replaced
with the current system time when the dump is made. This option should be
used with -p.
The format of these dump files is described below.
- -p
- Read Path: lines from standard input.
- -r site
- Generate a report for site. Generally site should be the
value of pathhost from inn.conf.
- -u dumpfile
- Read data from dumpfile. This option can be repeated to read data
from multiple dump files.
- -v level
- Set the verbosity level of the report. Valid values for level are
0, 1, and 2, with 2 being the default.
The format of the generated dump files is:
!!NINP <version> <start-time> <end-time> <nb-sites> <nb-articles> <average-time>
<site_0> <count_0> <site_1> <count_1> <site_2> <count_2> ...
!!NLREC
:<site_a>!<site_b>,<count_ab>:<site_c>!<site_d>,<count_cd> ...
!!NEND <nb-relations>
where times are UNIX timestamps. Then,
nb-sites records follow. Each
record is separated by a space or a new line, and consists of a host name
site_n followed by a number of appearances
count_n. The number
of processed Path: header lines is
nb-articles.
Afterwards,
nb-relations relations follow. In 3.0.x versions, the
relations are separated by a space or a new line, and their syntax is "
site_a!
site_b!
count_ab" where
site_a and
site_b are numbers of the site records starting at 0.
In 3.1.x versions, the relations begin with a colon and are separated by either
nothing or a new line. Their syntax is ":
site_a!
site_b,
count_ab" with the same meaning as in
previous versions. The count can be omitted when it is 1. More than two sites
can be specified in the relation (":
site_a!
site_b!
site_c,
count_abc").
For instance:
!!NINP 3.1.1 1302944821 1302944838 5 2 1302944826
newsgate.cistron.nl 1 news.trigofacile.com 2 news.ecp.fr 2 usenet.stanford.edu 1
bleachbot 1
!!NLREC
:3!2:2!1,2:4!0:0!2
!!NLEND 4
where the two processed Path: headers are:
Path: news.trigofacile.com!news.ecp.fr!usenet.stanford.edu!not-for-mail
Path: news.trigofacile.com!news.ecp.fr!newsgate.cistron.nl!bleachbot!not-for-mail
NOTES¶
If your INN doesn't have the "WP" feed flag (1.5 does not, 1.6 and 1.7
do, 2.0 and later all do), use the following
newsfeeds entry:
inpaths!:*:Tc,WH:<pathbin>/ginpaths
where
ginpaths is the following script:
#!/bin/sh
exec egrep '^Path: ' | <pathbin>/ninpaths -p -d <pathlog>/path/inpaths.%d
replacing <pathbin> and <pathlog> as above.
HISTORY¶
This is a slightly modified version of Olaf Titz's original
ninpaths
program, which is posted to alt.sources and kept on his WWW archive under
<
http://sites.inka.de/~bigred/sw/>.
The idea and some implementation details for
ninpaths come from the
original
inpaths program, but most of the code has been rewritten for
clarity. This program is in the public domain.
$Id: ninpaths.pod 9384 2011-12-25 20:57:03Z iulius $
SEE ALSO¶
newsfeeds(5),
sendinpaths(8).