henry (06/30/82)
It's possible for considerable backlogs to build up at a busy site which you have trouble calling. This is particularly a problem with the site that feeds you news, because the traffic from them will be substantial even if you are not keeping up, so logging of calls is not necessarily enough. We've just installed a small but useful monitoring utility, run by cron(8) late each evening before the uucp traffic starts. It sends login name "uucp" on your site mail via one or more other sites. Since uucp traffic handling is *almost* FIFO, receipt of this loop mail is fairly good evidence that all traffic spooled up before it was sent has gotten over. The mail is time-stamped so you know exactly when it was sent (since some mailers do not preserve the original postmark date). Here is the program and its manual page: ----- PATH=/bin:/usr/bin ; export PATH case $# in 0) echo 'Usage: uutimestamp system ...' >&2 exit 2 ;; esac for system do ( echo 'Subject: timestamp loop' ; echo ; echo "Sent `date`" ) | mail $system!utzoo!uucp done ----- .TH UUTIMESTAMP 8 local .DA 29 June 1982 .SH NAME uutimestamp \- send time-stamped loop mail via other systems .SH SYNOPSIS .B /usr/lib/uucp/uutimestamp system ... .SH DESCRIPTION .I Uutimestamp sends time-stamped mail to login name .I uucp via each of the other .IR system s named. Since .I uucp traffic is generally transmitted in FIFO order, receipt of a .I uutimestamp message .I usually indicates that all traffic queued up on that system prior to the message's time stamp has been received. .PP The intended use of .I uutimestamp is traffic monitoring, for which purpose it is run regularly by .IR cron (8). .SH SEE ALSO mail(1), uucp(1) .SH HISTORY Local product. .SH BUGS Sequence-number wraparound sometimes causes transmission not to be in FIFO order, so this check is not perfect. -----