NBATCHER

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

Nbatcher is a program designed to send batched USENET data out in an orderly and controlled fashion, while providing alternative transmission methods. As such, it is a replacement for csendbatch and the like, which typically require many entries in crontab. Nbatcher is intended to be run hourly out of cron as the USENET administrator (NEWSID).

Nbatcher scans the file nbatcher.ctl in the NEWSLIB directory to determine if work should be spooled for a system. In the control file, lines starting with asterisks are ignored; data lines are comprised of five colon-separated fields:

site:hour:bits:queue_size:command

Name of the USENET neighbor; it is the same as the site in the news

sys file.

This field is patterned after

cron's. If the hour is ``off,'' no work is spooled for the site. An hour of ``*'' matches every hour. It is also possible to specify specific hours, (e.g., 8, 09, or 22), a comma-separated list (e.g., 8,09,22), or a twenty-four range, like 1-15 for 10am through 3pm and 22-4, for 10pm through 4am.

This field specifies the number of bits to use in compression; it should be

a number between nine and 16, inclusive, or null. If a number is specified, it is passed on to the compress program via the ``-b'' flag.

This field specifies the maximum number of bytes allowed in the UUCP queue

for this site. The default is 100K. The UUCP queue size is determined by looking in the /usr/spool/uucp/site directory; if it doesn't exist, the check is bypassed. If there is data in the UUCP queue, nbatcher will only queue up as many USENET transfers as will fit within the limit specified by the ``queue_size'' field.

This field is used to specific the UUCP command that should be used to queue

the job; as distributed, the default is ``uux - -r site!rnews''; note the absence of the ``-z'' flag.

To set up a USENET neighbor to be controlled by nbatcher, the news sys entry for the neighbor must be modified to specify the ``F'' flag, and the file used to contain the article names must be BATCHDIR/sysname, where BATCHDIR is set in the Makefile as distributed.  

FILES

A logfile of failures, postponements, etc.

BUGS

Index

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

FILES

BUGS