NESTOR(1L)

NAME
nestor - NEws STatistics ORganizer

SYNOPSIS
nestor -ainorvxV [ filename ]

DESCRIPTION
Nestor parses and analyses the statistics as produced by the NNTP Usenet News Transfer Agent. Statistics from both sides of the NNTP protocol, receiver (nntpd) and transmitter (nntpxmit), are examined.

After scanning through the logfiles, nestor will generate some nice reports on what it found. The reports are printed on stdout; diagnostic error messages are printed on stderr.

Usually, nestor scans through the pre-defined logfile (as defined by the News Administrator at compile time), but this may be overruled by supplying an alternate filename (if the filename is a single "-", stdin will be used).

Remote-reading/posting-only clients, defined as systems that do make connections to the NNTP daemon but have never offered us a single article, are flagged in the Overall Network Connections Report (-n option) by an asterix in the last column.

Nestor recognizes the following options:

-i  Tell nestor to report incoming (nntpd) statistics (if any) only.

-n  Report networking statistics, like number of connections made, number of errors in transfer, etc.

-o  Tell nestor to report outgoing (nntpxmit/nntpxfer) statistics (if any) only.

-r  Report so called ``remote readership'' statistics: what exactly are those remote clients (rrn, nn) doing, how many reads, how many postings, etc.

-v  Be a bit more verbose, i.e. scream loud on unexpected errors in the logfile instead of silently ignoring them.

-x  Generate an eXtended report. This includes a quality classification on the links to other hosts.

-a  Select all of the above, except "-v".

-V  Show version and exit.

EXAMPLES
% nestor -i
                 *** Incoming Articles Via NntpDaemon ***
News Site        Accept  Reject  Failed   usr cpu   sys cpu   elapsed
foo.bar.edu       44915      28       0   0:18:24   0:33:37  10:46:46
another.foo.bar       7       0       0   0:00:03   0:00:08   0:00:38

% nestor -x
                 *** Overall Performance Averages ***
Perf. Quality    --- Articles/Second ---     ----- Network Link -----
News Site        incoming       outgoing     %-failed  classification
foo.bar.edu          1.16           0.03        1.00%       excellent
bad.lan.gov           n/a           1.47       82.78%             bad
another.foo.bar      0.18           5.22        0.00%       excellent

CAVEATS
This program is based on the statistics produced by the NNTP version 1.5.11 package; note that this may change in the future.

Besides 'nntpxmit', there's another program to handle Usenet news transmissions: nntplink. Although nestor correctly picks up the statistics that are logged by nntplink, verbose mode ('-v') will show that it doesn't like many of the additional nntplink log entries.
Also, with nntplink, the extreme values in the 'elapsed time' column in the the 'Outgoing Articles' report section ('-o') might cause some confusion: this is because nntplink keeps the connection open even after a short period (a couple of minutes) of idle time.

SEE ALSO
nntpd(8), nntpxmit(8), syslog(3)
RFC977 "Network News Transfer Protocol"

AUTHOR
Edwin Kremer (Email: edwin@cs.ruu.nl)
Utrecht University, Dept. of Computer Science, the Netherlands.

BUGS
Please report to the author; for details see the file README.