1NINPATHS(8)               InterNetNews Documentation               NINPATHS(8)
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NAME

6       ninpaths - Report Usenet Path statistics (new inpaths)
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SYNOPSIS

9       ninpaths -p -d dumpfile
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11       ninpaths -r site -u dumpfile [-u dumpfile ...] -v level
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DESCRIPTION

14       This is an efficient and space-saving inpaths reporting program.  It
15       works as follows:  you feed it the Path lines via an INN channel feed
16       or some other similar method, and from time to time the program writes
17       all its internal counters accumulated so far to a dump file.  Another
18       instance of the program picks up all the dump files, adds them up and
19       formats them into the report.  The purpose of the final report is to
20       summarize the frequency of occurrence of sites in the Path headers of
21       articles.
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23       Some central sites accumulate the Path data from many news servers run‐
24       ning this program or one like it, and then report statistics on the
25       most frequently seen news servers in Usenet article Path lines.  The
26       sendinpaths shell script can be run once a month to mail the accumu‐
27       lated statistics to such a site and remove the old dump files.
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29       You can get a working setup by doing the following:
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31       1.  Create a directory at pathlog/path (replacing pathlog here and in
32           all steps that follow with the full path to your INN log direc‐
33           tory).
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35       2.  Set up a channel feed using an entry like:
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37               inpaths!:*:Tc,WP:ninpaths -p -d <pathlog>/path/inpaths.%d
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39           if your version of INN supports WP (2.0 and later all do).  Replace
40           <pathlog> with the full path to your INN log directory.
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42       3.  Enter into your news user crontab something like:
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44               6 6 * * *   ctlinnd flush inpaths!
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46           (the actual time doesn't matter).  This will force ninpaths to gen‐
47           erate a dump file once a day.
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49       4.  Once per month, run the sendinpaths script, which collects the
50           dumps, makes a report, and then deletes the old dumps.  (You can
51           generate a report without mailing it and without deleting it with
52           "sendinpaths -n".)
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OPTIONS

55       -d dumpfile
56           Save dumps in dumpfile.  Any %d in dumpfile will be replaced with
57           the current system time when the dump is made.  This option should
58           be used with -p.
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60       -p  Read Path lines from standard input.
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62       -r site
63           Generate a report for site.  Generally site should be the value of
64           pathhost from inn.conf.
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66       -u dumpfile
67           Read data from dumpfile.  This option can be repeated to read data
68           from multiple dump files.
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70       -v level
71           Set the verbosity level of the report.  Valid values for level are
72           0, 1, and 2, with 2 being the default.
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NOTES

75       If your INN doesn't have the WP feed flag (1.5 does not, 1.6 does, 1.7
76       I don't know, 2.0 and later all do), use the following newsfeeds entry:
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78          inpaths!:*:Tc,WH:ginpaths
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80       where ginpaths is the following script:
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82           #!/bin/sh
83           exec egrep '^Path: ' ⎪ ninpaths -p -d <pathlog>/path/inpaths.%d
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85       replacing <pathlog> as above.
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SEE ALSO

88       newsfeeds(5), sendinpaths(8)
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90       This is a slightly modified version of Olaf Titz's original ninpaths
91       program, which is posted to alt.sources and kept on his WWW archive
92       under <http://sites.inka.de/~bigred/sw/>.
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HISTORY

95       ninpaths was written by Olaf Titz <olaf@bigred.inka.de>.
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97       The idea and some implementation details for ninpaths come from the
98       original inpaths program, but most of the code has been rewritten for
99       clarity.  This program is in the public domain.
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1033rd Berkeley Distribution         2002-11-25                       NINPATHS(8)