Книга: Linux Network Administrator Guide, Second Edition

The expire.ctl file

The expire.ctl file

The INN server uses a program called expire to delete expired news articles. The expire program in turn uses a file called /etc/news/expire.ctl to configure the rules that govern article expiration.

The syntax of /etc/news/expire.ctl is fairly simple. As with most configuration files, empty lines or lines beginning with the # character are ignored. The general idea is that you specify one rule per line. Each rule defines how article expiration will be performed on newsgroups matching a supplied pattern. The rule syntax looks like this:

pattern:modflag:keep:default:purge

The following list describes the fields:

pattern

This field is a comma-delimited list of patterns matching names of newsgroups. The wildmat(3) routine is used to match these patterns. The last rule matching a newsgroup name is the one that is applied, so if you want to specify wildcard (*) rules, they should be listed first in this file.

modflag

This flag describes how this rule applies to moderated newsgroups. It can be coded with an M to mean that this rule applies only to moderated newsgroups, a U to mean that this rule applies only to unmoderated newsgroups, or an A to mean that this rule ignores the moderated status and applies to all groups.

keep

This field allows you to specify the minimum time an article with an "Expires" header will be kept before it is expired. The units are days, and are a floating point, so you may specify values like 7.5 for seven-and-a-half days. You may also specify never if you wish articles to stay in a newsgroup forever.

default

This field is the most important. This field allows you to specify the time an article without an Expires header will be kept. Most articles won't have an Expires header. This field is coded in the same way as the keep field, with never meaning that articles without Expires headers will never be expired.

purge

This field allows you to specify the maximum time an article with an Expires header will be kept before it is expired. The coding of this field is the same as for the keep field.

Our requirements are simple. We will keep all articles in all newsgroups for 14 days by default, and between 7 and 21 days for articles that have an Expires header. The rec.crafts.brewing.private newsgroup is our internal newsgroup, so we'll make sure we don't expire any articles from it:

# expire.ctl file for the Virtual Brewery
# Expire all articles in 14 days by default, 7-21 days for those with
# Expires: headers
*:A:7:14:21
# This is a special internal newsgroup, which we will never expire.
rec.crafts.brewing.private:A:never:never:never

We will mention one special type of entry you may have in your /etc/news/expires.ctl file. You may have exactly one line that looks like this:

/remember/:days

This entry allows you to specify the minimum number of days that an article will be remembered in the history file, irrespective of whether the article itself has been expired or not. This might be useful if one of the sites that is feeding you articles is infrequent and has a habit of sending you old articles every now and again. Setting the /remember/ field helps to prevent the upstream server from sending you the article again, even if it has already been expired from your server. If your server remembers it has already received the article, it will reject attempts to resend it. It is important to remember that this setting has no effect at all on article expiration; it affects only the time that details of an article are kept in the history database.

Оглавление книги