Provided by: nn_6.7.3-8_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