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 shell script can be run once a month 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).
2. Set up a channel feed using an entry like:
inpaths!:*:Tc,WP:ninpaths -p -d <pathlog>/path/inpaths.%d
if your version of INN supports WP (2.0 and later all do). Replace
<pathlog> with the full path to your INN log directory.
3. Enter into your news user crontab something like:
6 6 * * * ctlinnd flush inpaths!
(the actual time doesn’t matter). This will force ninpaths to
generate a dump file once a day.
4. Once per month, run the sendinpaths script, which collects the
dumps, makes a report, and then deletes the old dumps. (You can
generate a report without mailing it and without deleting it with
"sendinpaths -n".)
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.
-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.
NOTES
If your INN doesn’t have the WP feed flag (1.5 does not, 1.6 does, 1.7
I don’t know, 2.0 and later all do), use the following newsfeeds entry:
inpaths!:*:Tc,WH:ginpaths
where ginpaths is the following script:
#!/bin/sh
exec egrep '^Path: ' | ninpaths -p -d <pathlog>/path/inpaths.%d
replacing <pathlog> as above.
SEE ALSO
newsfeeds(5), sendinpaths(8)
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/>.
HISTORY
ninpaths was written by Olaf Titz <olaf@bigred.inka.de>.
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 7851 2008-05-26 19:33:08Z iulius $