History/Serial Cleanup
----------------------

This utility looks directly inside the SQL database that holds the data
for a particular source, and "cleans it up".

The whois_rip server leaves old history and serial entries in the SQL DB
without cleaning them up, so after a while the database risks to bloat.
This utility fetches the old history and serial entries inside the SQL
DB, archives them in particular tables called "history_archive" and
"serials_archive" and then deletes the old entries from the "history" and
"serials" tables.

The tables are constructed in a way to ease the task of two forthcoming
utilities:
	- Disaster recovery (all the serials must be retrieved
	  subsequently)
	- Object history tracing (retrieval of the full history
	  of an object).

Be careful, because your database will not decrease in size (on the
contrary) unless you clean up the tables history_archive and
serials_archive! The idea is that, after being archived to a CD (or to a
separate directory) they should be dropped from the DB. More work will be
done on that.

You can issue the command "./hs_cleanup -?" to find how the binary works.

However, the best way to use it is to wrap it in a shell script
(clean_hist_ser.sh) that sets several variables and, most of all, calls
the utility remadmin.pl to stop the updates before the cleanup runs, and
restart them afterwards.

A note about remadmin.pl - currently, it is a PERL script . You will need
then PERL and the module Net::Telnet to run it. Please see the main
INSTALL file to see where you can download them from. The script will
eventually be rewritten in C.


General notes: hs_cleanup has some known bugs, besides the unknown
ones:). It also lacks some features. However, the functionality is mostly
working.
