texpire(8) [debian man page]
texpire(8) System Manager's Manual texpire(8) NAME
texpire - delete old news articles and repair leafnode news spool SYNOPSIS
texpire [-v[...]] [-q] [-f] [-h] [-r] DESCRIPTION
Leafnode is a USENET package intended for small sites, where there are few users and little disk space, but where a large number of groups is desired. Texpire is the program which deletes old articles from the local news spool and repairs most problems of the news spool. It can restore broken hard links, re-sort message.id links into the right directories (necessary when the spool has been moved to a different path) and update overview data. It can not repair loss of @spooldir@/news/group/* files. Archive feature: If a groupexpire parameter is set to -1 for a particular group (or pattern), texpire will skip this (these) groups. OPTIONS
-v Be verbose. A maximum of four -v can be used (the more v, the more verbose). Don't expect all the output to make sense. Cancels preceding -q options. -f Force expire. Expire will be made regardless of the access time of the file. Especially useful if you regularly backup your news spool or do other things to it where you open files in there. -q Quiet. Print no messages unless problems occur. Cancels preceding -v options. -r Repair (since v1.9.54). Runs a more thorough yet slower check to detect broken hard links between articles and message.id files. -h Help. Print short usage message and exit with code 0. FILES
See leafnode(8) for the list of files affected. NOTES
Texpire sets its real and effective uid to "news" (if it can), because almost all of the problems I have had with leafnode are due to files which aren't writable for user "news". BUGS
Texpire may not delete an article as soon as it should in certain circumstances, for instance after backing up or restoring data; eventu- ally it will. Texpire ignores "Expires" headers. Texpire is unable to delete articles in groups which have non-consecutive numbers with huge gaps. Texpire does not delete thread-based, but is only looking at individual articles, although the leafnode documentation of previous versions claimed otherwise. Texpire only removes the innermost empty directory when all articles expire from a group. On the next run, it will remove the parent, which then is empty again, so eventually, empty directories will be deleted after some texpire runs. ENVIRONMENT
LN_LOCK_TIMEOUT This variable is parsed as an unsigned integer value and determines how many seconds texpire will wait when trying to obtain the lock file from another leafnode program. 0 means to wait indefinitely. This variable takes precedence over the configuration file. AUTHOR
Written by Arnt Gulbrandsen <agulbra@troll.no> and copyright 1995 Troll Tech AS, Postboks 6133 Etterstad, 0602 Oslo, Norway, fax +47 22646949. Modified by Cornelius Krasel <krasel@wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de>. Copyright of the modifications 1997-1999. Modified Ralf Wildenhues <ralf.wildenhues@gmx.de>. Copyright of the modifications 2002. Modified by Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@gmx.de>. Copyright of the modifications 2002 - 2004. The archive feature was contributed by Andreas Meininger <a.meininger@gmx.net>. SEE ALSO
tcpd(8), hosts.allow(5), leafnode(8), fetchnews(8), RFC 977. leafnode 1.11.8 texpire(8)
Check Out this Related Man Page
sn,v0.3.8(8) System Manager's Manual sn,v0.3.8(8) NAME
sn - The sn news system. DESCRIPTION
If you think of a news spool as a black box, then sn is a bunch of programs to put articles in the box (snstore), to view articles in it (snntpd, sncat), remove old articles (snexpire,sncancel), generate a list of what's in it (snscan, snprimedb), or display that list (sndumpdb). In addition it can go find the articles to put in the box (snget). The sn system is designed for small sites, spooling a few dozen to a few hundred newsgroups. It is not meant for sites carrying a full news feed. sn is suitable as a replacement for leafnode (ftp.troll.no, by Arnt Gulbrandsen). It doesn't have leafnode's intelligence when it comes to retrieving upstream articles, but is less demanding on the filesystem and takes up less disk space. sn supports local news groups. sn tries to create aliases for crossposts instead of storing the article multiple times. sn can compress articles to save disk space. Compressing and uncompressing take place transparently. sn doesn't use configuration files. Instead, you write small shell scripts to customize sn's behaviour. REQUIREMENTS
sn has been tested only against Linux ver. 2.0. It makes heavy use of mmap(2) in MAP_SHARED and MAP_WRITE mode, so it won't work on pre-1.3.45 or so. I (harold-sn@nb.com.sg) am interested in bug reports, comments, and suggestions. NEWS SPOOL STRUCTURE
The news spool is /var/spool/sn, which all sn programs need in order to run. It contains the group directories in news.group.name format rather than the traditional news/group/name. Each such directory contains article files, named serially from 1, 2, etc. Each article file consists of up to 10 articles, which reduces the number of files and inodes required. These article files are mmap(2)ed before use, and they are cached to reduce search time. sn tries to keep the headers of these articles bunched together, to reduce the memory footprint. In addition to the article files, each newsgroup directory also contains files which control the behaviour of the sn system. All control files have filenames beginning with a dot, and they all reside in the group directory in which they are to have effect. In particular, if the group directory does not have a subdirectory .outgoing in it, it is considered a local news group. BUGS
When retrieving articles, there is a window of time between when an article is first marked as wanted and when it is committed to the news spool. Within this window it is possible to have the same article committed by a separate process. This defeats the aliasing feature so you could end up with more than one copy of an identical article. The ID database will only store one instance of an articles {ID,group,serial} tuple. After the second copy is committed to the spool, snstore will try to commit it in the ID database, and will fail. So it is possible that after the article has been expired, another copy will still remain, but be inaccessible if requested by its ID. sn doesn't sync the ID database after each write, so it could get corrupted. If you suspect it is corrupted, delete the files /var/spool/sn/.table, /var/spool/sn/.chain, and /var/spool/sn/.newsgroup, making sure snntpd and snget aren't running or scheduled to do so. Then run cd /var/spool/sn; snscan -n * |snprimedb This will recreate the ID database. PROGRAMS
sncat prints out the specified articles. This is useful if you want to transport the spool to another system. sndumpdb dumps the ID database. It is not normally used. snexpire expires articles in the spool. snfetch is the back end of the article fetcher. You can use suck (a separate package) instead. snget is the front end of the article fetcher. snmail converts a normal email message into a news article. It can be used to turn a mailing list into a local newsgroup. snnewgroup is a script to create newsgroup directories. sndelgroup is a script to delete newsgroup directories and flush the ID database of references to those articles. snntpd is the news server (an nnrpd). snprimedb feeds the ID database from formatted standard input. This database is what permits articles to be specified by their ID. This pro- gram is not used in normal operation. snscan scans the specified articles and outputs a line consisting of the article's ID, newsgroup, and serial number within the newsgroup. This output is suitable for feeding to snprimedb. This program is not used in normal operation. snsend takes articles on standard input and distributes them according to the type of newsgroup. snstore Like snsend, but considers all newsgroups as local, so stores all articles locally only. sncancel cancels articles, so they are no longer available locally. CONVENTIONS
Exit codes All sn programs exit 0 on success, 1 on invocation error; 2 on system error; 3 on format or protocol error. Other exit codes are possible. Options sn programs take -d to enable verbose messages (may be repeated), and -V, which displays the version and exits. Where a network timeout is appropriate, this is specified with -t timeout, in seconds. -P indicates the pid should be included in any status out- put. Other options are possible. Environment sn programs will take the contents of the SNROOT environment variable as the news spool rather than /var/spool/sn. If a program will need to run another, it appends /usr/sbin to its PATH variable if /usr/sbin is not already present. SEE ALSO
sncat(8), sndumpdb(8), snexpire(8), snfetch(8), snget(8), snmail(8), snnewgroup(8), sndelgroup(8), snntpd(8), snprimedb(8), snscan(8), snstore(8), snsend(8) N.B. Harold Tay sn,v0.3.8(8)