ninpaths - Report Usenet Path statistics (new inpaths)

ninpaths -p -d dumpfile

ninpaths -r site -u dumpfile [-u dumpfile ...] -v level

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 CWsendinpaths -n.)

-d dumpfile

Save dumps in dumpfile. Any CW%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.

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

    #!/bin/sh
    exec egrep '^Path: ' | ninpaths -p -d <pathlog>/path/inpaths.%d

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/>.

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.