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lognews (pre-alpha)
===================

lognews is software for collecting statistics from a Usenet server by 
logging header information from each article to a database.

The project's home page is at https://sourceforge.net/projects/lognews/

lognews is copyright Rayner Lucas 2004, 2010. It is released under the
GNU General Public License (see the file LICENSE for further details).


Installation
------------

You'll need to do the following to get this working:

* Install Python and MySQL-python. These come from:
	* http://www.python.org/
	* http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python
* Have access to a working news server and MySQL server. Note that your
  news server needs to support the NEWNEWS command. If you want it to log 
  the article sizes, you also need it to support the XOVER command.
* Create a database for the news articles, then run the SQL statements 
  contained in newsdb.sql to create the database tables.
* Edit lognews.conf and put in the connection details for your news server 
  and MySQL server.
* On a Unix system, check the path to the Python interpreter is correct on
  the first line of mkchecktime.py and lognews.py.
* Run mkchecktime.py to create the 'last check time' file.
* Start the article logging daemon by running lognews.py.

With a bit of luck, it'll then start grabbing article headers from the 
news server, parsing them, and logging the details to the database.


To do
-----

Make it go faster. The code currently runs too slowly to keep up with a 
full Usenet feed. A major reason for this is network latency (it needs to 
send lots of SQL queries and NNTP commands across the network, and waiting 
for the replies takes time). This problem would probably go away if the 
NNTP server, database server and logging server were all on the same LAN 
(or all three services were running on the same machine), but it would be 
better to rewrite the program to perform fewer transactions over the network.

Eventually there will also be a front end so you can view the statistics 
instead of just collecting them.