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pullnews

NAME

pullnews - a perl script for pulling news from one news machine and feeding it to another.

SYNOPSIS

pullnews [ -c config ] [ -g groups ] [ -h ] [ -p port ] [ -q ] [ -r file ] [ -s downstream-server ] [ remote-server ... ]

DESCRIPTION

pullnews is run as a regular user process. It reads a config file in the users home directory (normally called .pullnews) and connects to the upstream servers defined in there as a reader client. You may specifiy hostnames on the command line to limit the set of remote hosts it connects to, but each host must be listed in the .pullnews file.

For each server it connects to it pulls over articles and feeds them to the downstream (local) server via the IHAVE (feeder) NNTP command. This means the computer pullnews is run on must have feeding access to the downstream news host.

pullnews is designed for very small sites and is not meant for reverse-feeding large feeds.

You must have Graham Barr's Net::NNTP perl module installed on your system. This is part of the libnet bundle and can be found on CPAN or from Graham's site http://www.connect.net/gbarr/

OPTIONS

-c config

Normally the config file is stored in $HOME/.pullnews for the user running the pullnews program. The ``-c'' flag lets you change that.

-g groups

The ``-g'' flag specifies a collection of groups to get. The value must be a single argument with commas between group names. Each group must be defined in the config file. Only the remote hosts that carry those groups will be contacted.

-h

The ``-h'' flag just prints usage.

-p port

The ``-p'' flag can be used to change connecting port to something other than 119.

-q

The ``-q'' flag can be used to make things run more quietly.

-r file

The ``-r'' flag tells pullnews to create an rnews-compatible file, instead of feeding articles.

-s downstream-server

Normally pullnews will feed the articles it retrieves to the news server running on ``localhost''. The ``-s'' flag lets you change that.

CONFIG FILE

The config file for pullnews is a series of sets of lines describing the upstream hosts to connect to and the newsgroups to get articles from. A host line has no leading white space and just has the name of the host to connect to. Group lines come after a host line and have leading white space followed by the group name.

pullnews will update the config file to include the time the group was last checked and the highest numbered article successfully retrieved and transfered to the downstream server.

A sample configuration file might look like:

# Format group date high

data.pa.vix.com

        rec.bicycles.racing 908086612 783

        rec.humor.funny 908086613 18

        comp.programming.threads

nnrp.vix.com

        comp.std.lisp

The group entries for the two rec.* groups have been updated by an earlier run by pullnews, whereas the two comp.* groups were just inserted by the user and have not yet been checked.

HISTORY

pullnews was written by James Brister for INN. This is revision 1.4, dated 2002/12/03.

BUGS

pullnews is very simple and is lacking in more sophisticated features (like killing articles based on user-defined conditions) that better pull feeders most certainly have. It also doesn't keep or log much detail on articles transferred.

Due to a limitation in the Net::NNTP perl module, one of the functions in there is redefined inside the pullnews source. A future release of the libnet packages will fix that.

SEE ALSO

ctlinnd(8), inn.conf(5), innd(8), newsfeeds(5), shlock(1).