Changi NNTP Server 1.2

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Maintenance

One important statement first: Changi isn't maintenance free.

The good news is, that most tasks can be automated.


Removing Outdated Articles

After running Changi for a few days, you will appreciate having your own local article storage. But one night you will suddenly wake up, and recognize, that your harddisks become filled up with outdated, smelly articles, which doesn't deserve to be called news.

That's the time for news expiration, done by a fast and tiny program called Expire.

In a previous chapter it has been stated, that only the Changi server itself has permission to touch the local newsbase. Well, Expire is an exception. It will connect the local server and force it in a special mode. In this mode Changi has no permission to change the local newsbase. Local posts are rejected, incoming articles transmitted by Rnews are redirected to a temporary batch file for later processing.

Expire will then run through the history file. This file, or, to be more precisely, these two files had been created by Changi in order to record each article stored in the local newsbase. Expire deletes outdated articles and removes their corresponding entries in the history. After having done that, it will put back the Changi server in normal running mode and terminate.

Expire may also be used to check and, if necessary, repair the history files.


Maintaining Newsgroup Lists

If you're exchanging news with other Internet sites, you need to keep up with newly created groups and groups being removed. You will receive special control messages like normal articles. These articles are processed by Changi, which may be configured to automatically create or remove newsgroups.

You may manually add or remove newsgroups by calling another client program included in the Changi package, named Chanco. This program will connect to Changi in a way, which is different from the ordinary connection used by newsreaders and which needs special authorization. In fact, Chanco can do more than just adding or removing newsgroups, but is a very powerfull tool to control your server. You may kick out undesirable clients, change most of Changi's command line options on the fly or even shutdown the server. If authorization is properly set, you may even control the server remotely.

A Java version of Chanco called JavaChanco has been included too, but doesn't support all functions of the command line program.

So far the shining part of newsgroup maintenance. What Changi currently can't do is maintaining subscription lists.

In single user environments you must manually update the list of newsgroups you want to retrieve from your provider. For provider installations with leased lines there's currently no tool available to maintain the list of subscriptions of your downlinks.


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URL: changi/manual/whatmain.html
Created: 21 July 1997
Revised: 21 July 1997
Author: harald@os2point.ping.de