NEWSHOUND(8)

NAME newshound
- News collecting system used with nntpcached.

SYNOPSIS
newshound [-?cbfhSA] [-d level] [-u [l]ow,[m]iddle,[h]igh] [-n newsgroup] [-l lowmark] [-g number] [-s news.server.com] [-p portnumber]

DESCRIPTION
Newshound is a nntpcached utility which collects and creates a sorted list of newsgroups that have been accessed by the sites user base. This list is then used to retrive all the article within the popular newsgroups and store them using nntpcached. Switches override settings in the newshound.conf file.

OPTIONS
Newhound understands the following command line switches:

-?  Outputs a verbose usage listing.

-c  Collect, sort and create newshound's hound list. This is a file that contains all the newsgroups your user base reads. Starting from most popular newsgroups and ending with low level or one off newsgroup accessing. The -l option can be used to strip these low level newsgroups out. The -b option will ban particular newgroups.

-b  Turn on the ban for those newsgroups that use a large amount of bandwidth. Such as the binaries and pictures newsgroups.

-f  Fetch all the newsgroup articles from the hound list. This type of job should be crond to run during low network usage. Like in the middle of the night. You can limit the number of newsgroups collected by using the -g option.

-h  Fetch only the newsgroup headers. This argument is used with the -f option. Programs like pine collects the header information from newsgroups first, instead of the articles.

-S  Display some setting details for newshound.

-A  Automatic Mode. This setting will fetch articles after a break of every NN minutes. The value of NN is compiled into the program and is set at around 60 minutes (default). This mode runs newshound forever.

-d [level]
    Set debug level. Between 1 to 4. 1 being light and 4 being heavy.

-u [l]ow,[m]iddle,[h]igh
    Update all the newsgroups article index in the hound list file. This can help reduce the number of articles checked or collected. As well has fill in any missing articles from a newsgroup. A single newsgroup can have its index set by using the -n option.

-n newsgroup
    Set the newsgroup article index pointer to the value set by the -u option. This is useful if you want to skip a large number of old articles.

-l lowmark
    This option will only sort the newsgroups that have had the number of articles cached greater then or equal to lowmark.

-g number
    Get the specified number of newsgroups from the hound list. The default is all newsgroups in hound list.

-s news.server.com
    Select another news server to collect articles from. The default is localhost.

-p portnumber
    Select another news port to collect articles from. The default is 119.

EXAMPLES
This is a list of helpful examples

newshound -c -l 100 -b
    Create a hound list of newsgroups that have had more then 100 articles cached and ban (remove) the large bandwidth newsgroups.

newshound -A &
    Run in Automatic Mode and collect news after a break of NN minutes.

newshound -d 3 -g 10 -f
    Fetch the top 10 newsgroups from hound list, set debug level to 3 so we can see what file checking and cacheing is being done.

newshound -f -h
    Fetch all newsgroup headers only. This reduces download bandwidth while showing the user what articles are avaliable. If your like me, you skip thru 80% of all the articles in a newsgroup. This option is effective on low volume newsgroups.

newshound -u l
    Update the hound list's article index pointer to low so that when we do a fetch, everything we haven't got is then cached.

newshound -u h -n alt.comp.newsgroup
    Set the alt.comp.newsgroup article index pointer to high. This will stop newshound collecting old articles.

FILES
cache.history   nntpcached history file
    hound.list      sorted list of newsgroups
    newshound.conf	newshound configuration file.

AUTHORS
Andre Dedio (andre@weblink.solutions.net.au)
Vic Metcalfe (vic@brutus.tlug.org) - tcp socket routines.

BUGS
If you use the -s option on a remote server, the cache file checking routine and the creation of a hound list can fail. This can be solved by using NFS and mounting the remote newscache directory locally. You will have to compile newshound to reflect this. Newshound influences the cache.history file to bias large volume newsgroups. You should either run newshound using an old cache.history file or run it several weeks after installing nntpcached. The -h option updates the newsgroup article index pointers. If a normal fetch is started then all articles appear to be cached. To reset the index pointers just uses the -u option before the new fetch is started. But this really defeats the purpose of collecting the headers. If you really need to collect articles and headers then do it this way. newshound -f ; newshound -u l ; newshound -f -h This will created the header files from the existing articles. Send bugs to andre@weblink.solutions.net.au

SEE ALSO
pine(1),nntpcached(8),nfsd(8),mountd(8)