Provided by: nn_6.7.3-12_amd64 
NAME
nnadmin - nn database administration
SYNOPSIS
nnadmin [ commands ]
DESCRIPTION
nnadmin is a control program for the nnmaster(1M) daemon which is responsible for building and
maintaining the database used by the nn(1) news reader.
nnadmin allows you to display extracts from the log file, display the "raw" contents of the database,
make consistency checks on the database, instruct the running nnmaster to expire one or more groups,
alter the options of the running nnmaster, and much more.
nnadmin runs in two modes: interactive and non-interactive.
In interactive mode, simple one line menus are used to show the available operations which are then
selected by typing the letter associated with the command (normally the first letter in the command
name).
In non-interactive mode, the commands argument will be used as a series of key-strokes which are
interpreted exactly as if they were typed in from the keyboard in interactive mode. For example, to stop
the nnmaster, the following invocation of nnadmin can be used:
nnadmin MK
which will select the (M)aster submenu from the main menu, and then the (K)ill entry from the submenu.
In non-interactive mode, the menus are not displayed and the commands are not echoed! nnadmin will exit
when there are no more key-strokes to be read from the commands argument. It is not possible to specify
a group name in the commands argument, so the functionalities of nnadmin that relates to specific groups
are only available in interactive mode.
Some "dangerous" commands will require that you confirm them by following them by "Y" on the command
line. The most noteable are IY (initialize database) and EY (expire all groups). These commands will be
marked with a [Y] following the command name.
You can also invoke an interactive nnadmin using the :admin command in nn.
SHELL ESCAPES
At all prompts you can hit `!' to spawn a subshell.
The working directory of the subshell will be changed to the database directory when invoked from the
MASTER or DUMP menus, and it will changed to the group's spool directory (if it exists) when invoked from
the GROUP menu.
MAIN MENU
From the main menu (identified by the ADMIN prompt) you can select the following operations:
C)onf
Show current configuration parameters such as directories, files, programs, network usage, etc.
E)xpire [Y]
Send a request to the nnmaster daemon to schedule (and run) expire for all groups in the database.
G)roups
Enter the GROUP submenu.
I)nit [Y]
Send a request to the nnmaster daemon to recollect all groups in the database.
L)og
Enter the LOG submenu.
M)aster
Enter the MASTER submenu.
Q)uit
Quit nnadmin.
S)tat
Print general statistics about the database. See the section on Database Statistics below.
U)pdate
Update the incore copy of the database master index.
V)alidate
Make a thorough consistency check on the database. If inconsistencies are found in a group, you
will be asked whether a request should be sent to the nnmaster daemon to recollect the group (in
non-interactive mode, requests will be sent automatically for all corrupted groups).
W)akeup
Send a wakeup signal to the nnmaster daemon to have it receive messages sent to it, perform the
required actions, and then collect articles as necessary.
Z (silent validation)
This operation is identical to the Validate operation, expect that no output is produced during
the consistency check; this operation is used by the nnmaster to execute the -C option.
THE MASTER MENU
The master menu (identified by the MASTER prompt) provides access to overall database information, and to
send control messages to the nnmaster daemon.
C)heck In interactive mode and in verbose batch mode (nnadmin MC), print a message telling whether
nnmaster is running or not. In silent batch mode (nnadmin =MC) exit with a status code of 0 if
nnmaster is running and 1 otherwise; this may be useful is administrative scripts.
D)ump Enter the DUMP submenu.
F)iles
Print a listing (using ls(1)) of all the data and index files in the database.
G)roup
Print the master index entry for a single group identified by its internal group number.
K)ill
Stop the nnmaster when it has finished its current task.
O)ptions
Change the runtime options of the running nnmaster daemon. Currently, only the value of the -r
and -e options can be modified.
S)tat
Print general statistics about the database. See the section on Database Statistics below.
T)race
Turn the trace option -t on or off in the running nnmaster.
THE DUMP MENU
The dump menu (identified by the DUMP prompt) allows you to print the master index entry for various
selections of groups in the database.
A)ll
Print all groups in the database.
E)mpty
Print the empty groups in the database.
H)oles Print the groups where the `min' field in the active file is not the first article saved in the
database (because it doesn't exist or because it is ignored for some other reason, e.g. bad or
old).
I)gnored
Print groups which are ignored, either in the GROUPS file or because of some other condition
(mainly no spool directory).
N)on-empty
Print the non-empty groups in the database.
V)alid Print the groups which are present in the active file.
in(W)alid
Print the groups in the database which are not present in the active file.
THE LOG MENU
The log menu (identified by the LOG prompt) enables you the extract specific entries from the log file,
and to truncate the log file.
The entries in the log file share the following format:
<class>: <date> <time> (<user>): <message>
where <class> identifies the message class, the <date> and <time> specify when the entry was made, the
<user> specifies who created the entry (the letter "M" denote the nnmaster), and the <message> is the
text of the entry.
To extract the log file entries of a specific class, simply enter the letter identifying the class:
A - admin to master communication
This class of messages are related to the sending of messages from an nnadmin program to the
nnmaster daemon.
B - bad articles
Reports about bad articles which have been ignored or removed (controlled by the -b and -B options
to nnmaster).
C - collection statistics
Statistics about collection of new articles. The message has the format:
Collect: nnn art, ppp gr, ttt s
meaning that nnn articles in ppp groups were collected in ttt seconds (real time).
E - fatal errors
Fatal errors encountered during operation. These errors require manual intervention to be fixed
(some of the fatal errors occur if thing that "cannot happen" happens anyway, and may indicate a
bug in the software).
M - nnmaster messages.
Master start/stop messages.
N - NNTP related messages
Various messages related to the NNTP part of the nnmaster, mostly about lost connections and
failed attempts to connect to the NNTP server. These messages should only appear if you use NNTP,
and your NNTP server is down for some reason.
O - old articles
Reports related to ignoring (and removing) old articles when building the database (controlled by
the -O and -B options to nnmaster).
R - reports
Non-fatal error which enables the nnmaster to continue operation, but may prevent a user to run nn
(file access problems). Reported problems should be checked. The most common report message will
probably be
some.group: no directory
which indicates that the spool directory for that group has disappeared (most likely because it
has been rmgroup'ed).
T - trace output
Messages produced as a result of using the -t option on the nnmaster. This is primarily for
debugging purposes.
U - usage statistics
If nn is compiled with the STATISTICS option enabled, an entry will be made in the log file every
time a user has spent more than five minutes on news reading. The message will have the following
format:
USAGE hours.minutes
Since it is possible to suspend nn, or leave the terminal while nn is active, nn tries to be
intelligent when it calculates the usage time so it will reflect the actual time spent on news
reading. The usage statistics can be summarized using the nnusage(1M) program.
V - validation errors
When inconsistencies are detected in the database during validation, an entry for each corrupted
group will be entered in the log file.
X - expire statistics
Messages similar to the Collect statistics reporting the result of running expire on the database.
Reports related to ignoring, removing, renumbering, and reactivation of groups are also given
class X.
To extract a specific entry class, grep(1) is used, so it may take a while on a large log file.
There are also a few special operations on the log file:
G)roup
Extract the entries which refers to a specified group.
(1-9) tail
Invoke tail(1) to extract the last 10-90 entries in the log file.
space
Equivalent to 1 (list last 10 lines of log).
(.) all
Display the complete log file.
(@) clean [Y]
Move the Log file to Log.old, and create a new empty Log file. If you want to clean out the old
log file as well, simply repeat the clean operation (this will result in an empty Log.old file.)
THE GROUP MENU
When you enter the group menu (identified by the GROUP prompt), nnadmin will prompt you for the name of a
news group, which you can enter with the usual completion feature described in the nn(1) manual. You can
then perform the following operations on the specified group:
C)lear_flag
Clear a group specific flag. See the section on group flags below.
D)ata
Dump the contents of the data file containing the extracted article headers for the group.
E)xpire
Request the nnmaster to run expire on the group.
F)iles
List the files (using ls(1)) containing the index and data for the group.
G)roup
Switch to another group.
H)eader
Dump the master index entry for the group.
R)ecollect
Request the nnmaster to recollect all articles in the group.
S)et_flag
Set a group specific flag. See the section on group flags below.
V)alidate
Perform validation on the group's database information.
Z)ap [Y]
Remove group from news system - this will be done by running the rmgroup program which must reside
in the NEWS_LIB directory. Of course, this should be done with great caution.
INDIVIDUAL GROUP FLAGS
You can set and clear the following flags for individual groups to control the future behaviour of
nnmaster on that group.
Notice that these flags will be reset to their default value if you reinitialize the database using
nnmaster -I. To change these flags permanently, they should be set or cleared in the GROUPS file.
A)lways_digest
Normally, nnmaster will only attempt to split digests into individual articles if it can easily
recognize an article as a digest. This requires that the word "digest" appears somewhere in the
subject line, and that one of the first few lines in the body of the article loosely matches the
subject. A few news groups frequently receives digests which break one or both of these
requirements. To have nnmaster split these digests into individual articles anyway, you can turn
on the "always digest" flag on these news groups. This will instruct nnmaster to treat all
articles in the group as digests (naturally, articles which are then found not to contain other
articles are still treated as normal articles.)
C)ontrol
This is a special flag for the control group. It indicates that the "Newsgroups:" field in the
article header cannot be trusted (it does not specify the groups to which the article has been
posted.)
D)irectory missing
This flag indicates that the spool directory for the news group cannot be found (the group has
probably been removed with rmgroup(1M)). It is set automatically be the nnmaster if it cannot
access the directory. When the flag is set, nnmaster completely ignores the group, so it can be
used to disable news collection in specific groups. If you recreate the group or the directory
manually, you must also clear this flag to have the nnmaster recognize the group again.
M)oderated
Indicates that the group is moderated. This flag is normally initialized automatically from the
active file, and it should not be changed lightly.
N)ever_digest
This is the opposite of the "always digest" flag; when set, the nnmaster will never attempt to
split any articles in that group into subarticles.
DATABASE STATISTICS DISPLAY
When you select the (S)tat operation in the main or master menus, you will get some general statistics
about the database:
initialized
The time when the database was last rebuild using nnmaster -I.
last_scan, last_size
The time stamp on the active file and its size the last time the nnmaster read it.
no of groups
The total number of groups in the database.
Articles
The total number of articles in all groups. This is not an exact number, because it will count
split digests as a single article (making the number too small), and it may count some articles
that have been expired (making the number too large).
Disk usage
The total number of (1 kbyte) disk blocks occupied by the database.
MASTER INDEX ENTRIES
The master index entries displayed when you select the (H)eader operation in the master and group menus
contain the following information:
group_name group_number
The first line of the display will show the name of the group and the internal group number which
is used to identify the group in the database.
first/last art
This is the numbers of the first and last article that are currently stored in the database.
active info
This is the numbers of the first and last article in the news system as read from the active file.
They will normally match the numbers above, but they may differ while the nnmaster is working on
the group (or it has not yet collected all the articles in the group).
Offsets: index->..., data->...
These values show the starting position for the next write operation on the index and data files.
They are primarily used for consistency checking and recovery after a system crash, but after an
"expire by rewrite" operation (expire method 2) which is performed "in-situ", the data and index
files may physically be longer than the actual data stored in them.
Flags:
This shows the current flags set for this group. If no flags are set, the field is omitted from
the display. One extra flag which was not explained above is the BLOCKED flag; it is a temporary
locking flag set on a group by the nnmaster while it is updating the database files for that group
to prevent nn clients to access that group.
RAW DATABASE DISPLAY
When you select the (D)ata operation on the group menu, you will get a combined display of the raw data
and index files for that group. The index file contains a single 32 bit value for each existing article
number. This value is an offset into the data file pointing to the header for the corresponding article.
When nn want to access the article from number N to the last article, it looks up the offset for article
number N in the index file, and uses this as the starting point for reading article header information in
the data file. It then simply reads to the end of the data file in which the article headers for
articles number N+1, N+2, and so on follows immediately after the header for article number N.
The article header information is presented in a very terse form; each of the output lines are described
below for reference purposes:
offset = xxxx , article # = nnnnn (type)
This shows the offset into the data file and the article number. The offset is stored in the
index file for quick access. If no type is printed it is a normal article. Other types are:
"digest header" and "digest sub-article".
xpost(count): nnn, nnn, nnn, ...
Cross-postings to other groups are encoded as a list of internal group numbers.
ts=nn hp=nn fp=nn lp=nn ref=nn[+Re] lines=nn
These values are used by nn to sort, present, and access an article:
ts is the time stamp on the article; it is a simple encoding of the posting date and time found in
the Date: field.
hp, fp, and lp are offsets into the file containing the article text: the header position, first
text position, and last text position. The first will be zero for normal articles, but not for
articles in a split digest. The last will be equal to the length of the file for normal articles,
but not inside digests.
ref is the number of references on the Reference: line. If "+Re" follows the number, the subject
line contained a "Re:" prefix which has been removed.
Sender(length): name
The name of the sender in "ready to print" format, i.e. reduced to 16 characters as explained in
the nn manual.
Subj(length): subject
This is the full subject line from the article header (except for Re: prefixes in various
formats).
FILES
The $db, $lib, and $news used below are synonyms for the DB_DIRECTORY, LIB_DIRECTORY, and the news
system's lib directories respectively.
$db/MASTER Database master index
$db/GROUPS News group names in MASTER file order
$db/DATA/nnn.x Index file for group number nnn
$db/DATA/nnn.d Data file for group number nnn
$master/GATE Message channel from nnadmin to nnmaster
$master/MPID The process id of the nnmaster daemon.
$Log The log file (truncate it regularly!)
The MASTER file contains a record for each news group, occurring in the same sequence as the group names
in the GROUPS file. The sequence also defines the group numbers used to identify the files in the
database and in a few other places.
The GATE file will be created by nnadmin when needed, and removed by nnmaster when it has read it.
Therefore, to send a message to the nnmaster requires that you are allowed to write in the $master
directory.
SEE ALSO
nn(1), nncheck(1), nngrep(1), nntidy(1)
nnquery(1M), nnusage(1M), nnmaster(8)
WARNINGS
The GATE file is created with the owner and modes of the user that runs nnadmin which may cause problems
if the owner of the nnmaster process (normally "news") is not allowed to read the created GATE file (a
"umask" of 022 is ok.) Unless you allow ordinary users to create files in the LIB directory where the
GATE file resides, only the owner of the directory (normally "news") and "root" can use nnadmin to send
messages to the nnmaster. However, to send a wakeup signal to the master, anybody can run
nnmaster -w
BUGS
The user interface is completely out of line with the rest of the nn family, and the way to run nnadmin
in the non-interactive mode is a bit bizarre. This is not likely to change, because I believe there are
more important things to do!
AUTHOR
Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark
E-mail: storm@texas.dk