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DELAYER(8) InterNetNews Documentation DELAYER(8) NAME delayer - A pipe to delay line-based input by a given time SYNOPSIS some-program | delayer [--[no-]buffered] [--delay seconds] [--store file- name] -- some-other-program [args ...] Legacy calling convention: some-program | delayer seconds some-other-program [args ...] DESCRIPTION The delayer program implements a delaying pipe. Lines sent to the standard input of the process are spooled, and only printed to the standard input of some-other-program after a certain delay time has passed. The main use case is for a news feed that deliberately should not distrib- ute articles as soon as possible. One reason is giving NoCeM messages time to arrive so that innd remembers the Message-IDs of those cancelled arti- cles before they actually arrive. It permits cancelling articles before they are locally stored and spread to other peers. The delay can be set up for outgoing feeds wanting that or, even better for not slowing the propa- gation of articles, internally between a frontend instance of innd receiv- ing the articles from all your peers and another local instance of innd fed by your frontend with a delay except for NoCeM articles. Another use case is using a link only as a backup. CONFIGURATION The steps to set up a delayed feed using delayer and innfeed are: * Choose a name for that feed, e.g. "innfeed-delayed". * In pathetc, copy innfeed.conf to innfeed-delayed.conf. * Edit innfeed-delayed.conf in pathetc, and change the occurrences of "innfeed" to "innfeed-delayed", typically in the log-file, pid-file and status-file parameters. If these parameters are not set, you should explicitly set them in innfeed-delayed.conf so that their default val- ues do not conflict with a running instance in parallel of a real-time feed using innfeed. For instance: log-file: innfeed-delayed.log pid-file: innfeed-delayed.pid status-file: innfeed-delayed.status Using the same value for backlog-directory in both innfeed.conf and in- nfeed-delayed.conf is fine because the site names in newsfeeds are unique (see below with "news.uu.net" and "news.uu.net-delayed"). * Possibly limit max-connections to 1. * Only keep in innfeed-delayed.conf the configuration of the peers which should receive a delayed feed. * Add a new entry to newsfeeds in pathetc like: innfeed-delayed!\ :!*\ :Tc,Wnm*,S16384:<pathbin>/delayer --delay 300 -- \ <pathbin>/innfeed -c innfeed-delayed.conf This will delay articles via that feed for 300 seconds. If the intent is to give NoCeM messages time to arrive, the delay should match the frequency at which they are sent in the news.lists.filters newsgroup. * Use "innfeed-delayed!" instead of "innfeed!" in the newsfeeds entries for peers which should receive a delayed feed. If you wish, you can also set up two entries for each peer, keeping a real-time feed through "innfeed!" for NoCeM messages, and delaying the feed of other articles through "innfeed-delayed!". news.uu.net/uunet\ :!*,news.lists.filters\ :Tm:innfeed! news.uu.net-delayed/uunet\ :*,@news.lists.filters\ :Tm:innfeed-delayed! Cancel articles should also be delayed so that they arrive after the article they cancel. Otherwise INN cannot authenticate them (using Cancel-Lock). Unauthenticated cancels are not processed by default (see docancels in inn.conf) but if you decide to process them, you can also send the control.cancel pseudo-newsgroup as a real-time feed. Be sure to use the same "news.uu.net-delayed" peer name in innfeed-de- layed.conf. Note that you should only configure a delayed feed for a remote peer if its news administrator agrees with that (he may want a real-time feed, or already have locally implemented a delay on his in- coming feeds). * Reload the newsfeeds configuration file: ctlinnd reload newsfeeds 'setting delayed feeds' OPTIONS --buffered, --no-buffered By default, output is buffered. This increases the time until an arti- cle is actually sent if the number of articles is small. Disable buffering to have a more accurate delay, at a price of a (possibly neg- lectable) performance overhead. --delay seconds Delay articles by the given amount of seconds. Default is 60. --store filename By default, all buffered lines are written out if the input is closed, even if the configured delay has not been reached yet. When this flag is used, these lines will be written to the given file instead, to be used upon next startup. Using an absolute path name is recommended. -- some-other-program [args ...] -- separates the options to delayer from the program the output is written to: some-other-program is the full path to the program, option- ally followed with some args parameters. LEGACY OPTIONS This interface is considered legacy and will be removed some day. delay Delay articles by the given amount of seconds. some-other-program [args ...] The full path to the program the output is written to, optionally fol- lowed with some args parameters. BUGS If the standard input is closed (when for instance the feed is closed or restarted), all lines in the store are printed immediately, breaking the contract of delaying them, unless the --store option is used. If the number of articles in that feed is rather low (just a few articles per delay time or less), some effects of buffering will delay the transmis- sion even further. See the --no-buffering option to alleviate this. HISTORY Initial version written in July 1998 by Christian Mock <cm@tahina.priv.at>. Improved and documented by Christoph Biedl in January 2024. SEE ALSO delay(1), innfeed.conf(5), newsfeeds(5). INN 2.8.0 2026-06-22 DELAYER(8)
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | CONFIGURATION | OPTIONS | LEGACY OPTIONS | BUGS | HISTORY | SEE ALSO
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