CONTROLCHAN(8) InterNetNews Documentation CONTROLCHAN(8)
NAME
controlchan - Channel-fed control message handler
SYNOPSIS
controlchan [-ch]
DESCRIPTION
controlchan removes the responsibility for handling control messages
(except cancels) from innd and instead processes them from a channel or
file feed.
The two Perl modules "Encode" and "MIME::Parser" are required by
controlchan.
To reduce load, controlchan keeps a copy of control.ctl and
control.ctl.local in memory and checks permissions (including any
required PGP headers) before any scripts are called. These two
configuration files are automatically reloaded when controlchan notices
they have been modified. Also, the default case of an unrecognized
control article is handled internally. The "drop" case is handled with
far less fuss.
Normally, controlchan is invoked by innd as configured in newsfeeds.
An example entry is below. Make sure that the newsgroup
"control.cancel" exists so that controlchan does not have to scan
through cancels, which it will not be processing anyway.
controlchan!\
:!*,control,control.*,!control.cancel\
:AC,Tc,Wnsm\
:<pathbin in inn.conf>/controlchan
controlchan can also be manually invoked with a mere path to a file
(containing a complete control article with its headers and its body)
or a token on its standard input:
echo '/path/to/a/control/article' | controlchan
echo '@0303465234000000000000235AE000000002@' | controlchan
Note that in the (very, very unlikely) event that you need to process
ihave/sendme control messages, be sure that logipaddr is set to false
in inn.conf, because in this case controlchan needs a site name, not an
IP address.
controlchan tries to report all log messages through syslog(3), unless
connected to an interactive terminal. To enable syslog(3)'ing for
versions of Perl prior to 5.6.0, you will need to have run h2ph on your
system include files at some point (this is required to make
"Sys::Syslog" work). If you have not done so, do this:
cd /usr/include
h2ph * sys/*
If you run FreeBSD, you will need to run the following in addition:
h2ph machine/*
OPTIONS
-c By default, controlchan does not process articles whose Date: or
Injection-Date: header fields are too far in the past (more than
artcutoff days, as set in inn.conf) or one day in the future. It
allows preventing a malicious replay of old control articles.
Using the -c flag disables this check on the cutoff date.
-h Gives usage information.
HISTORY
Written by Katsuhiro Kondou <kondou@nec.co.jp> for InterNetNews.
Converted to POD by Julien Elie.
$Id: controlchan.pod 10283 2018-05-14 12:43:05Z iulius $
SEE ALSO
control.ctl(5), inn.conf(5).
INN 2.6.4 2018-05-15 CONTROLCHAN(8)