Re: archive rolling/cron jobs

[Harshal Chhaya <harshal@mumbai-central.com>]

Christopher,

> I am a relatively new user of mhonarc and plan to use it with Mailman and
> possibly Ht-dig.

I have been using mhonarc with the SmartList mailing list manager for
a few years now. The archiving etc. functions don't really depend on
the specific mailing list software so you might be able to use what
I have been using. I have not used mharc and so have no idea what it
can and can't do.

As for searching, I have tried ht-dig and namazu (http://www.namazu.org)
and prefer namazu. I don't use it currently but it has a mhonarc-specific
filter that makes searching mhonarc-created archives easier. The archive
for this list also uses namazu and you can see some of the powerful
features there ('search by author' etc.).

My setup has a special 'list-archive' user as a subscriber to a
list. There is a separate user for each list. The alias for this 
user does a couple of different things - it saves all incoming mail
to a file and it pipes the incoming mail to a script. This script
(written in perl in this case, but it could be anything) calls
mhonarc with the right arguments and also manages rolling over the
archives. For eg. when called for the first time on the 1st of every 
month, it moves the archive file to a file named for the previous
month (for eg. on Aug 1 2003, it will more list-arc to jul2003-arc)
and create a new directory for the mhonarc generated files (in this
case, it will use 'aug2003' as the 'outdir' for mhonarc).

You could also call mhonarc as a cron job every few hours to update
the archive files from the saved mail.


I hope I managed to explain the my setup. If not, let me know and
I will try to be clearer.

 
> 1- I will be running mhonarc as a cron job. Would I have to run a separate
> mhonarc command for each list and could it be as simple as issuing the
> mhonarc command with an RC file specified and various command line switches
> ( I haven't read up on RC files yet)?

Yes. You just need to specify the specific RC file, the outdir and the
source file on the command line for each list.

 
> 2- Does mhonarc have an capabilities of rolling archives, so that I could
> specify changing monthly, quarterly, annually, or whatever? It looks like
> users have come up with some home-grown solutions, but I am wondering what
> the most common thing to do is.

I don't think that mhonarc can handle log rolling on its own so you
have 2 choices - either create/adapt a script that manages the archives
for you or use a tool like rotatelogs (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/programs/rotatelogs.html) or logrotate (http://www.rt.com/man/logrotate.8.html).


Hope this helps. If anything requires further clarification, let
me know.

Regards,
- Harshal

-- 
 http://www.mumbai-central.com : Where Mumbaikars meet

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