active - List of newsgroups carried by the server

The file pathdb/active lists the newsgroups carried by INN. This file is generally maintained using ctlinnd(8) to create and remove groups, or by letting controlchan(8) do so on the basis of received control messages. This file should not be edited directly without throttling innd, and must be reloaded using ctlinnd before innd is unthrottled. Editing it directly even with those precautions may make it inconsistent with the overview database and won't update active.times, so ctlinnd should be used to make modifications whenever possible.

Each newsgroup should be listed only once. Each line specifies one group. The order of groups does not matter. Within each newsgroup, received articles for that group are assigned monotonically increasing numbers as unique names. If an article is posted to newsgroups not mentioned in this file, those newsgroups are ignored.

If none of the newsgroups listed in the Newsgroups header of an article are present in this file, the article is either rejected (if wanttrash is false in inn.conf), or is filed into the newsgroup CWjunk and only propagated to sites that receive the CWjunk newsgroup (if wanttrash is true).

Each line of this file consists of four fields separated by a space:

    <name> <high> <low> <flag>

The first field is the name of the newsgroup. The newsgroup CWjunk is special, as mentioned above. The newsgroup CWcontrol and any newsgroups beginning with CWcontrol. are also special; control messages are filed into a control.* newsgroup named after the type of control message if that group exists, and otherwise are filed into the newsgroup CWcontrol (without regard to what newsgroups are listed in the Newsgroups header). If mergetogroups is set to true in inn.conf, newsgroups that begin with CWto. are also treated specially; see innd(8).

The second field is the highest article number that has been used in that newsgroup. The third field is the lowest article number in the group; this number is not guaranteed to be accurate, and should only be taken to be a hint. It is normally updated nightly as part of the expire process; see news.daily(8) and look for CWlowmark or CWrenumber for more details. Note that because of article cancellations, there may be gaps in the numbering sequence. If the lowest article number is greater then the highest article number, then there are no articles in the newsgroup. In order to make it possible to update an entry in-place without rewriting the entire file, the second and third fields are padded out with leading zeros to make them a fixed width.

The fourth field contains one of the following flags:

    y         Local postings are allowed.
    m         The group is moderated and all postings must be approved.
    n         No local postings are allowed, only articles from peers.
    j         Articles are filed in the junk group instead.
    x         No local postings and ignored for articles from peers.
    =foo.bar  Articles are filed in the group foo.bar instead.

If a newsgroup has the CWj flag, no articles will be filed in that newsgroup, and local postings to that group will be rejected. If an article for that newsgroup is received from a remote site, and it is not crossposted to some other valid group, it will be filed into the CWjunk newsgroup instead. This is different than simply not listing the group, since the article will still be accepted and can be propagated to other sites, and the CWjunk group can be made available to readers if wished.

If the <flag> field begins with an equal sign, the newsgroup is an alias. Articles cannot be posted to that newsgroup, but they can be received from other sites. Any articles received from peers for that newsgroup are treated as if they were actually posted to the group named after the equal sign. Note that the Newsgroups header of the articles are not modified. (Alias groups are typically used during a transition and are typically created manually with ctlinnd(8).) An alias should not point to another alias.

Written by Rich CW$alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. Converted to POD by Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>.

$Id: active.5,v 1.12.2.1 2004/05/17 05:48:54 rra Exp $

active.times(5), controlchan(8), ctlinnd(8), inn.conf(5), innd(8), news.daily(8)