Provided by: nn_6.7.3-8_amd64 
NAME
nnmaster - nn database manager
SYNOPSIS
nnmaster -I [lmit]
nnmaster -w
nnmaster -v
nnmaster -l [ "lock message" ]
nnmaster [ options ] [ groups ]
nnmaster -F [ options ] [ groups ]
DESCRIPTION
nnmaster is the daemon which is responsible for building and maintaining the database used
by the nn(1) news reader.
Normally, nnmaster is started when the system enters multi-user mode, and runs until
system shutdown. To facilitate this, you should place the following call in /etc/rc (or
similar) to invoke the nnmaster daemon:
$master/nnmaster -l -r -C
where $master is the MASTER_DIRECTORY defined during configuration of nn.
When nnmaster is started as specified above, it will first unlock the database in case it
was locked (-l), perform a thorough consistency check on the database (-C).
Then, every 10 minutes (-r), it will look at the time-stamp of the news active file to see
whether new articles have arrived on the system (or whether articles have been expired).
(See -U)
If the active file has been modified, nnmaster will collect the header information from
the new articles and enter them into the database (or remove the headers of the expired
articles from the database).
If it detects that some articles have been expired, it will automatically remove the
header information of the expired articles from the database.
ARTICLE COLLECTION OPTIONS
Normally, nnmaster will collect all available news groups defined in the news active file.
The set of collected groups can be controlled via the argument line. Groups can be either
included or excluded:
A group name, e.g. comp, will cause the group and all its subgroups to be collected.
Individual groups, e.g. news.software.nn, can also be specified
A group name preceded by an exclamation mark, e.g. !talk.politics, will cause the group
and all its subgroups to be ignored.
An empty argument, i.e. "", will cause all groups that are not ignored to be collected.
For example, to collect everything but rec and misc, use the following command:
nnmaster -r !rec !misc ""
If the empty argument had been omitted, nothing would be collected, since the presence of
any groups arguments causes nnmaster to ignore all groups which are not explicitly
mentioned.
Example 1: The following commands can be executed by cron to collect different sets of
groups at different intervals or under different conditions:
nnmaster -B -O14 rec misc sci -LBO -u
nnmaster !rec !misc !sci "" -u
Example 2: The group arguments are used in the given sequence, e.g. to leave out comp.sys,
but still collect comp.sys.ibm.pc, use the command:
nnmaster -r comp.sys.ibm.pc !comp.sys ""
The use of the -u option in the first example is essential, since each of the commands
will update the active file time stamp which will prevent the other command from detecting
new articles that have arrived.
Using this method to keep specific groups out of the database must be used with great
caution; just a single invocation of nnmaster without any arguments will collect all the
otherwise ignored groups!
COLLECTION OF ARTICLES
The following options control how nnmaster performs the collection of new articles.
-r [ min ]
Daemon mode. The nnmaster will put itself in the background (unless -f is also
specified), and will checks for arrival of new articles and expired articles every
min minutes (and update the database accordingly). If min is omitted, the default
is to check every 10 minutes.
Without the -r option, the nnmaster will just perform a single collection of new
articles (if any) and then exit. This can be used to have the nnmaster started by
cron(8) at regular intervals instead of having it as a daemon which sleeps between
checking for new articles. Since the nnmaster is a bit expensive to start up (it
has to read a few files), it is up to you to decide which mode is best on your
system. (I have also heard that it works to call nnmaster without -r from
inews(1). I cannot recommend this unless you receive batched news; invoking
nnmaster for every received article sounds too expensive to me.)
-h [ sec ]
Hold collection of new articles until next scan if new articles have arrived
withing the last sec [60] seconds. This is useful to prevent nnmaster from
competing for disk i/o with an rnews process which is unbatching incoming news, or
a running expire process. It will have the side effect of limiting the number of
C: entries in the log, since collection of incoming batches will typically be done
in larger thunks.
-f Run nnmaster in foreground in daemon mode (see -r). Useful if nnmaster is invoked
from inittab. (Notice that if you use a respawn entry in inittab, you will not be
able to stop nnmaster using the -k option, since init will immediately start
another master.)
-C Perform a consistency check on the database on start-up, and rebuild corrupted
database files. This operation can be quite time-consuming since it reads through
all the database files.
-b Normally, articles without a proper news header (no Newsgroups: line) are ignored.
Specifying the -b option causes these `bad' articles to be included in the database
(normally with no sender or subject).
-B Remove `bad' articles. Sometimes, articles without a header ends up in the news
spool directory. These articles have no article id, and therefore, they will never
be expired by expire(8). This option will allow the nnmaster to silently remove
these articles (a `B' entry will occur in the log file).
-O days
Ignore articles which are older than the given number of days. This may help keep
old 'stray' articles out of the database. If the -B options is also specified, the
old articles will be removed from the news spool directories. Old ignored or
removed articles will be reported with an `O' entry in the log file. This option
can be disable for individual groups by the O flag in the GROUPS file (see below).
-R N Specifies how the auto-recollect operation is performed on the groups having this
option set in the GROUPS file (see below). Four methods are available (default is
method 1):
1: Run expire on the group when new articles arrive.
2: Run expire on the group on every scan.
3: Recollect all articles when new articles arrive.
4: Recollect all articles on every scan.
-M mode
Normally, nnmaster will send a message via mail to the news administrator (OWNER)
when an error or potential problems (primarily nntp related) occur. This can be
restricted to only fatal errors (nnmaster terminated) if mode is 1, and disabled
completely if mode is 0.
-Q Normally, nnmaster will print a message on the system console or in the syslog if a
fatal error happens. This option will prevent this, so only a type 'E' entry is
written to the Log file.
DATABASE EXPIRATION
Since articles does not stay forever in the news system, the database must be cleaned up
regularly to remove the information stored for expired articles. Expiration of the
database is normally scheduled using the nnadmin(1M) command executed by cron at a
suitable time when expire on the news articles has completed. The following command will
send a message to the nnmaster and cause it to initiate expire on all news groups:
nnadmin =EYW
Selective expiration of individual groups can be done from nnadmin (interactive mode). It
can also be done by invoking nnmaster with the -F option. For example, the following
command will run expire on all groups except the `rec' groups:
nnmaster -F -k !rec ""
The -k option is required to terminate the currently running master since two daemons
cannot be running at the same time. Thus to run expire (on all groups) in this way from
cron, the following commands must be used: nnmaster -Fk "" ; nnmaster -r ...
It is also possible to have nnmaster detect expiration automatically (see -e). This
requires that the min field in the active file is updated by the news expire (this is not
the default case when Cnews is used). However, this is not always a safe indication since
the first article may not have been expired, while a lot of other articles have been
deleted.
There are several strategies available in the nnmaster to do this clean-up, each having
their strengths and weaknesses.
Method 1 (default): Rebuilds the database from the existing database information by
comparing the current database contents with the contents of the news group directories,
eliminating entries whose file no longer exists. This method is guaranteed to eliminate
all expired articles from the database, and it is reasonably fast because it only has to
read the directories, not each article file.
If news is accessed remotely via nntp, the list of existing articles cannot efficiently
be fetched by reading a local directory. Instead an XHDR request is sent to the nntp
server to get a list of articles.
Method 2: Eliminates only the expired articles before the first article in the group.
This is very fast since only the active file and the database itself is accessed, but it
will obviously leave some expired articles in the database. This method requires that the
min field in the active file is updated by expire.
Method 3: Discard the current database information and recollects all articles. This is
obviously very time consuming, and it is therefore not recommended, especially not with
nntp.
The options related to database expiration are:
-E N Select expire method N. (If N is omitted, the default method is used).
-e [N] Automatically run expire in the database on groups where the min number in the
active file has increased by N (1 if omitted) articles. This is disabled by
default (since the min field is often unreliable).
-F Run expire once and exit. If a list of groups is specified on the command line,
the matched groups (see the rules above) will be marked for expiration. If no
groups are specified, only the groups already scheduled for expire will be expired.
Consequently, to expire all groups, a blank argument "" (matching all groups) must
be specified.
DATABASE LOCKING
The database can be locked centrally, which will normally disallow all access to the
database, and even block nnmaster from being (accidentally) started. When a lock is set
on the database, all currently running clients will terminate the next time they try to
access the database. Setting a lock on the database can thus also be used to force
running clients to terminate.
The following options set and clear locks on the database:
-l message
Locks the database with the given message. The message will be displayed every
time a program tries to access the database.
-l Unlock the database if it was locked.
-i Ignore a possible lock and continue. This can be used to have nnmaster operate on
a database which is blocked from normal user access.
Since only one nnmaster can operate on the database at any one time, a running nnmaster
daemon must be stopped before a lock can be set on the database. If neither -f nor -r is
specified with the -l option (in both forms), nnmaster will terminate after setting or
clearing the lock.
DATABASE INITIALIZATION
The following options are used to initialize and update the central database files:
-I [limit]
Initialize database. This option will erase an existing database, and create an
empty database containing entries for the currently known groups. nnmaster will
offer you to use an existing GROUPS file when initializing the database.
The optional limit can be used to put a limit on the number of articles that will
be collected in each group during the first collection of articles following the
database initialization. This is useful on systems where the 'min' field in the
active file is unreliable or not maintained (Cnews doesn't) to limit the work done
to do the initial collection of news after the initialization of the database. If
news is accessed remotely from an NNTP server, this is even more important! If
limit is omitted, or is zero, nnmaster will trust the min field and collect all
articles in the range min..last.
-G Reread the GROUPS file. This option is used to instruct nnmaster to parse the
GROUPS file after it has been edited. See the section on the GROUPS file below.
MISCELLANEOUS OPTIONS
The following options controls various details of the nnmaster's behaviour:
-D [ N ]
Run nnmaster in "debug mode". If N is omitted, or equals 1 or 3, this will produce
a compact but still very informative trace of the collection or expire process
directly on the terminal. This is most useful when doing the first collection of
articles after initializing the database with -I. If N is 2 or 3, a trace of the
NNTP traffic is written to a file nnmaster.log in the TMP directory. This option
disables -r.
-H Identifies the host which nnmaster is running on as the nntp-server for its
clients, i.e. that it can access the news spool directory locally without using
NNTP. Normally, nnmaster will detect this by itself by comparing the host name to
the contents of the nntp_server file, so this option should really be superfluous.
-y retries
In some networked environment, opening an article (shared from another machine via
NFS) may fail for no obvious reason. Using this option, it is possible to cause
nnmaster to perform retries attempts to open an article before marking the article
as non-existing in the database.
-L types
Exclude the specified entry types from the log file. This is normally used to
exclude the 'C'ollecting and e'X'pire entries (-LCXO).
-t Trace the collection process. This will place a lot of information into the log
file (T: entries).
-u Normally, nnmaster will just compare the time-stamp on the active file with a time-
stamp saved in the database to see if new articles have arrived. The -u option
forces the nnmaster to read the active file on start-up to see if new articles have
arrived.
-U Some SVR4 systems (and maybe SunOS) have a useful "feature". Writing files with
mmap() may not update the last-changed timestamp on the file. Since INN uses
mmap() for writing the active file, this becomes a problem for nnmaster. The -U
option causes nnmaster to unconditionally read the active file each time the repeat
delay (-r) time expires.
-v Print the release and version identification for nnmaster, and exit.
-w Wakeup the real nnmaster. Send a signal to the nnmaster daemon to have it check
for new articles immediately.
-k Kill the already running nnmaster daemon before proceeding with the operation
specified by the other options (or terminate if no other operation is requested).
THE GROUPS FILE
The primary purpose of the GROUPS file is to store the names of the news groups
represented in the database. Each line in the file corresponds to an entry in the
(binary) MASTER file, and the sequence of the lines in the GROUPS file must never be
changed unless the database is reinitialized afterwards.
However, the contents of the lines in the GROUPS file can be edited to control how the
nnmaster should handle each individual group.
The format of each line is:
news.group.name [ timestamp ] [ flags ]
The news group name is the name of the group, and must not be changed in any way. If the
group is no longer in the news active file, and consequently the group does no longer
exist, group name can be replaced by a `@' character which will instruct nnmaster to
ignore this entry without having to rebuild the entire database.
The optional time stamp indicates when the line was added to the GROUPS file and is used
by nn to detect new groups. When the GROUPS file is built initially from the active file,
the time stamps are omitted which simply means that they are "old".
One or more of the following flags can be added to the GROUPS line to control nnmaster's
handling of the group:
D Causes nnmaster to treat all articles in the group as digests, even when they don't
initially look like digests. Articles which are found not to be digests after all,
are still not digested.
N Instructs nnmaster to never digest any articles in the group.
O Disables the -O option for this group, i.e. all existing articles will be included
in the database (and they will not be removed if the -B option is specified). This
flag should be set on groups which you never expire, or have a very long expire
time!
R Causes nnmaster to recollect all available articles in the group whenever a new
article is received. This is said to be useful is some high-traffic clarinet
groups with many cancelled articles.
>file Instructs nnmaster to append all new articles to the specified file. This makes it
possible to keep specific groups out of the way of expire. The archive file can be
access directly from the nn client using the goto-group command. The file name
must be a full path name to a file in an existing, writeable directory.
@ Instructs nnmaster to completely ignore this group - this is equivalent to setting
the group name to `@' as described above.
! or X Causes nnmaster to ignore the group and not collect the group's articles in the
database.
Comments (starting with `#' and continuing to the end of line) and empty lines are allow
in the GROUPS file, but it is strongly recommended to keep the changes to the GROUPS file
as small as possible, because of the implicit correspondence with the binary MASTER file.
It is not recommended to edit the GROUPS file while nnmaster is running because it may add
new groups to the file. After editing the GROUPS file, the command
nnmaster -G
must be run before restarting the nnmaster to parse and verify the new GROUPS file.
NNTP SUPPORT
The nnmaster can access the news articles from a local news spool directory as well as
from an NNTP server. When compiled with NNTP enabled, nnmaster will compare the name of
the NNTP server and the name of the local host; if they are identical, nnmaster will
bypass NNTP and access the articles directly.
When it has to access the news articles via NNTP, it cannot time-stamp the active file, so
instead it transfers the entire active file from the NNTP server and compares it with a
local copy of the last active file fetched from the NNTP server. This is not very
expensive in terms of cpu-cycles, disk-load, or net-bandwidth, but to stay on friendly
terms with the NNTP server administrator, you should probably not use shorter update
intervals than the standard 10 minutes.
Setting a much higher update interval than the standard 10 minutes is not really
recommended either, since an update normally implies fetching a burst of news articles
from the NNTP server, so setting the interval too long may imply that the load on the NNTP
server will be more un-even.
In expire method 1, the use of XHDR just to get a list of existing articles in a group is
definitely a waste of resources on the nntp server (but still lower than using method 3).
Before using the XHDR request, nnmaster will send a non-standard "LISTGROUP" request; if
the nntp server supports this request, it should return an OK_HEAD status followed by an
(unordered) list of article numbers (one per line) terminated by a `.' line. The nntp
servers supporting this request will be much less loaded during expire.
The -O option does not work with NNTP. The -B option will only work with NNTP if the
nnmaster is running on the NNTP server.
FILES
The $db, $master, and $news names used below are synonyms for the DB_DIRECTORY,
MASTER_DIRECTORY, and NEWS_LIB_DIRECTORY defined during configuration.
$db/MASTER Database master index
$db/GROUPS News group names and flags in MASTER file order
$db/DATA/nnn.[dx] Database files for group number nnn
.../.nn[dx] Database files if located in the group directories
$master/GATE Message channel from nnadmin to nnmaster
$master/MPID The process id of the nnmaster daemon.
$Log The log file (the location is configuration dependent)
$news/active Existing articles and groups
/usr/lib/nntp_serverContains the name of the NNTP server.
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's DATA directory.
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.
The contents of the Log file are described in the nnadmin manual.
SEE ALSO
nn(1), nncheck(1), nngrep(1), nntidy(1)
nnadmin(1M), nnspew(8), nnusage(1M)
AUTHOR
Kim F. Storm, Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark
E-mail: storm@texas.dk