Web hosting contract - purge This field allows you to specify the
purge This field allows you to specify the maximum time an article with an Expires header will be kept before it is expired. The coding of this field is the same as for the keep field. Our requirements are simple. We will keep all articles in all newsgroups for 14 days by default, and between 7 and 21 days for articles that have an Expires header. The rec.crafts.brewing.private newsgroup is our internal newsgroup, so we’ll make sure we don’t expire any articles from it: # expire.ctl file for the Virtual Brewery # Expire all articles in 14 days by default, 7-21 days for those with # Expires: headers *:A:7:14:21 # This is a special internal newsgroup, which we will never expire. rec.crafts.brewing.private:A:never:never:never We will mention one special type of entry you may have in your /etc/news/expires.ctl file. You may have exactly one line that looks like this: /remember/:days This entry allows you to specify the minimum number of days that an article will be remembered in the history file, irrespective of whether the article itself has been expired or not. This might be useful if one of the sites that is feeding you articles is infrequent and has a habit of sending you old articles every now and again. Setting the /remember/ field helps to prevent the upstream server from sending you the article again, even if it has already been expired from your server. If your server remembers it has already received the article, it will reject attempts to resend it. It is important to remember that this setting has no effect at all on article expiration; it affects only the time that details of an article are kept in the history database. Handling Control Messages Just as with C News, INN can automatically process control messages. INN provides a powerful configuration mechanism to control what action will occur for each of a variety of control messages, and an access control mechanism to control who can initiate actions against which newsgroups. The control.ctl file The control.ctl file is fairly simple in structure. The syntax rules for this file are much the same as for the other INN configuration files. Lines beginning with # are ignored, lines may be continued using /, and fields are delimited by :. When a control message is received, it is tested against each rule in turn. The last rule in the file that matches the message is the rule that will be used, so you should put any generic rules at the start of the file and more specific rules at the end of the file. The general syntax of the file is: message:from:newsgroups:action The meanings of each of the fields are: message This is the name of the control message. Typical control messages are described later. from This is a shell-style pattern matching the email address of the person sending the message. The email address is converted to lowercase before comparison. newsgroups If the control message is newgroupor rmgroup, this field is a shell-style pattern matching the news- group created or removed. action This field specifies what action to take for any message matching the rule. There are quite a number of actions we can take; they are described in the next list.