Newsgroups: alt.sources Path: news.csc.fi!news.eunet.fi!EU.net!Germany.EU.net!ruhr.de!smart.ruhr.de!tom From: tom@smart.ruhr.de (Thomas Neumann) Subject: opt - README Date: Wed, 1 Feb 1995 16:25:27 GMT Message-ID: Organization: News at smart Lines: 51 [Sorry if you see this a second time, but I have some evidence that the first posting of this article did not make it beyond our system.] ====================================================================== A short description of the "opt"-Package that I posted to alt.sources earlier today follows. "opt" - A news feed optimizer ---------------------------- If you are running a large news feed with a lot of downstream sites, you are probably using some newsfeeds (inn) or sys (cnews) management utility such as "gup" or "feeder" to allow the downstream sites to select newsgroups at their own will. For many server sites, it would be sufficient to obtain exactly the set of newsgroups required by all their downstream sites from the servers news provider. In practice, it is not easy to figure out exactly what is needed, so many large news servers fetch all/all from their news provider, just because "otherwise we might miss some group a downstream site might want". This is where "opt" comes in handy. It reads the per site newsgroup lists that are maintained by your "gup" or "feeder" installation anyway and calculates a minimum join of all your downstream site requests, which is then output in a format suitable for use in mails to the news providers "gup" or "feeder". That way newsgroup requests from your downstream sites automatically propagate to your news provider, and your server always carries exactly the needed set of newsgroups, nothing more and nothing less. If you think this is something that might be useful to you, I suggest you compile the program and run the included "demo" shell script to see it in action. Before doing so, you'll need to edit the "demo" script and set ACTIVE to the correct location of your active file. If you have any questions, bug reports, enhancement ideas or even bugfixes, please join the "opt" mailinglist by sending e-mail to with the following message body subscribe opt-users your_email_adress_here I hope you will enjoy this little program as much as I enjoyed writing it. -- Tom