active.times - List of local creation times of newsgroups
The file
pathdb/active.times provides a chronological record of when
newsgroups were created on the local server. This file is normally updated by
mod-active and
innd whenever a newgroup control message is
processed or a "ctlinnd newgroup" command is issued, and is used by
nnrpd to answer NEWGROUPS requests.
Each line consists of three fields:
<name> <time> <creator>
The first field is the name of the newsgroup. The second field is the time it
was created, expressed as the number of seconds since the epoch. The third
field is plain text intended to describe the entity that created the
newsgroup. This field is encoded in UTF-8 and is usually the e-mail address of
the person who created the group, as specified in the control message or on
the
ctlinnd command line, or the newsmaster specified at configure time
if no creator argument was given to
ctlinnd (by default, it is
"usenet").
You can get the
active.times file of another NNTP server with
getlist(1).
The line:
news.admin.moderation 1175716803 <[email protected]>
shows that the newsgroup news.admin.moderation was created on April 4th, 2007,
at 20:00:03 UTC. This date can be obtained for instance with "convdate
-dc 1175716803" (
convdate(1) is shipped with INN) or "date
-u -d "Jan 1, 1970 00:00:00 +0000 + 1175716803 seconds"". It is
when the newsgroup was locally created; in this example, it is when a control
message sent by "
[email protected]" was received and processed by
the news server (see
control.ctl(5) for more details). Therefore, the
time is not necessarily the same on every news server.
Written by Rich $alz <
[email protected]> for InterNetNews. Converted to
POD by Russ Allbery <
[email protected]>.
,
convdate(1),
ctlinnd(8),
getlist(1),
inn.conf(5),
innd(8),
mod-active(8),
nnrpd(8).