NAME

kiboze.pl - a news archiving 'bot

SYNOPSIS

kiboze.pl [-hvd] [-V] [-Q] [-n newsrcfile] [-s newsserver]

DESCRIPTION

This script connects to a news server (or set of servers) and archives the newsgroups specified in a newsrc file. This can be used to save entire newsgroups for later searches, just message archiving.

USAGE

Without any options, kiboze.pl will connect to each of the news servers specified in turn, and attempt to download up to 1000 articles (or whatever the current value of $MAXARTS is).

-h: Prints a short help message and exits.
-v: Prints the version number and exits.
-d: Prints out the script defaults and exits.
-V: Verbose mode. Prints out some basic status messages when they are necessary. More information is available in debugging mode, but you probably don't want to read it.
-Q: Quiet mode. Never prints anything out. This is handy if you're putting the script into a cron job and don't want to look over any logs; on the other hand, most of what it blocks is error messages anyway, so you might want to have them in your mailbox.
-s newsserver: Specifies which news server to connect to. This may be used to connect to just one server out of a set. If combined with the -n flag, you can also connect to servers not present in the script.
-n newsrcfile: Specifies which newsrc to use. If this newsrc is already used by a server, then it uses that information for the server; otherwise, the -s flag is required.

Recommended Usage

After configuration, set up your crontab to run the script periodically. A sample crontab line, which runs every four hours:

  # Run kiboze.pl
  0 0,4,8,12,16,20 * * * /home/tskirvin/news/kiboze/kiboze.pl

Disk space requirements will vary depending on how many groups you're archiving; I've been archiving a local hierarchy (cmi.*) for about four years now and have saved a few hundred megabytes worth of articles, but it would be a lot worse to get a large hierarchy.

NNTP Authentication

If you want to use NNTP authentication to connect to your news servers, create a file ~/.nntpauth that has lines like this:


  news.server.com.invalid   username password
  news.server2.com2.invalid username2 password2

REQUIREMENTS

Requires Perl 5.004 or better, News::Newsrc, and News::Article. All other requirements should be included automatically with Perl5.

TODO

Make some default newsrc files if one doesn't exist. Start using an active-file type dealie, to increase efficiency by a whole lot and allow the various servers to work together. Make some more scripts to search the cache file by message-id. Add locking stuff.

Note that most of this stuff should be taken care of in Version 2.

AUTHOR

Tim Skirvin <tskirvin@killfile.org>

HOMEPAGE

http://www.killfile.org/~tskirvin/software/kiboze/