david@dhw68k.cts.com (David H. Wolfskill) (04/14/89)
If you maintain smail/pathalias files, the following may be of interest
to you. Otherwise, please feel free to skip the rest of this posting.
In spite of some opinions to the contrary :-), I have been trying to do
my best to ensure that this site handles email as well as possible.
I use smail 2.5; I also use pathalias (and feed it the entire contents
of the files sent out in comp.mail.maps, as well as some supplementary
files of my own devising).
The pathalias connection data for the local area is such that a change
in one site would be likely to be reflected in substantial changes to
the output of pathalias. Therefore, when I re-ran pathalias, I would
want to find out if the new pathalias output was "reasonable" (by
whatever measure seemed appropriate).
At first, I would run pathalias so its output (as reformatted for smail)
would be in a "holding file," then do a "diff -c1" between the previous
and new such files. This gets very tedious very quickly, and I really
don't have time for such things.
A few months ago, I finally became sufficiently frustrated with the
situation that I decided to actually... write a program! :-)
At this point, I will excerpt some of the documentation from the front
of the source file to describe what it does:
/*
* Program to list statistics, some of which may be of interest,
* regarding the output of "pathalias," as well as do a basic
* "reality check" on that output.
* This version can read the pathalias output either in the
* original order, or either of the 2 rotations:
* "pathalias": <cost> <destination> <path>
* "smail": <destination> <path> <cost>
* unknown: <path> <cost> <destination>
* smail likes the second order, so the stdout of this program
* is the same information in "smail" order (regardless of the
* order in which stdin is). This program may thus be used in
* place of the "sed" segment of the "pathproc" pipeline that is
* distributed with smail.
* To facilitate its use in that application, the report the
* program generates comes out on stderr.
*/
To show what it does, I'll feed this to "pathalias -i -c":
dhw68k = dhw68k.cts.com
dhw68k zardoz(DIRECT+FAST), spsd(DIRECT+FAST), crash(EVENING/3)
crash = cts.com
crash loral(DIRECT), telesoft(HOURLY)
spsd bergy(DIRECT+LOW), zardoz(DIRECT+FAST+5), csun(DEMAND+FAST)
zardoz sunkist(HOURLY), uci-ics(DIRECT)
csun sdsu(DEDICATED), polyslo(DEDICATED), <talaris>(WEEKLY)
marge cleo(LOCAL), dhw68k(WEEKLY+LOW), kosman(DIRECT+HIGH)
to get:
0 dhw68k %s
30000000 marge marge!%s
30000195 kosman marge!kosman!%s
30000025 cleo marge!cleo!%s
600 crash crash!%s
1100 telesoft crash!telesoft!%s
800 loral crash!loral!%s
600 cts.com crash!%s
120 spsd spsd!%s
340 csun spsd!csun!%s
30340 talaris spsd!csun!talaris!%s
435 polyslo spsd!csun!polyslo!%s
435 sdsu spsd!csun!sdsu!%s
325 bergy spsd!bergy!%s
120 zardoz zardoz!%s
320 uci-ics zardoz!uci-ics!%s
620 sunkist zardoz!sunkist!%s
0 dhw68k.cts.com %s
Now, I'll feed the above to the program I'm talking about to get:
[stderr first]
Adj Total Total #Hops Cost
Site #Dest #Hops Cost /Dest /Dest
TOTALS 18 30 90036375 1.67 5002020.83
crash 4 6 3100 1.50 775.00
dhw68k 2 0 0 0.00 0.00
spsd 6 14 31995 2.33 5332.50
zardoz 3 5 1060 1.67 353.33
*** WARNING! Bogus "neighbor" sites follow! ***
marge 3 5 90000220 1.67 30000073.33
Adj #Hops --- Pathlength Distribution ---
Site #Dest /Dest 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10+
TOTALS 18 1.67 2 5 8 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
crash 4 1.50 0 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
dhw68k 2 0.00 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
spsd 6 2.33 0 1 2 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
zardoz 3 1.67 0 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
*** WARNING! Bogus "neighbor" sites follow! ***
marge 3 1.67 0 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
[and now stdout]
dhw68k %s 0
marge marge!%s 30000000
kosman marge!kosman!%s 30000195
cleo marge!cleo!%s 30000025
crash crash!%s 600
telesoft crash!telesoft!%s 1100
loral crash!loral!%s 800
cts.com crash!%s 600
spsd spsd!%s 120
csun spsd!csun!%s 340
talaris spsd!csun!talaris!%s 30340
polyslo spsd!csun!polyslo!%s 435
sdsu spsd!csun!sdsu!%s 435
bergy spsd!bergy!%s 325
zardoz zardoz!%s 120
uci-ics zardoz!uci-ics!%s 320
sunkist zardoz!sunkist!%s 620
dhw68k.cts.com %s 0
OK, sorry to have been so long-winded(?)....
Does the above seem (potentially) useful to you? Could it be made more
so? Can you think of a good name for the program that does this?
For whatever it's worth, I've given copies away to a couple of other
folks; one reported that it ran fine at his installation (which is,
shall we say, on a very different type of machine); the other reported
some problems, but I never was real clear on what they were (that was on
a VAX running VMS).
If there is sufficient interest, I will (of course!) summarize -- and if
I get a good enough name for the beastie, I'll even send it off to
Brandon for inclusion in comp.sources.misc. (I'm willing to consider
additional distribution methods if asked.)
If you're reading this far, thank you -- and please let me know of your
suggestions,
david
--
David H. Wolfskill
uucp: ...{spsd,zardoz,felix}!dhw68k!david InterNet: david@dhw68k.cts.comdavid@dhw68k.cts.com (David H. Wolfskill) (04/21/89)
Thanks to all those who responded to my question in the Subject: line;
one person mentioned that he runs pathalias without the option to spit
out the cost information, then skips the sed and lcasep steps; he
reports that the amount of time taken is substantially reduced.
All others who responded seemed quite interested in a positive way;
thank you all. I intend to send the program off to Brandon (for
distribution in comp.sources.misc) either this morning or tonight.
My thanks also to those who think up names are better than I do! :-)
I will send the program out as "pathrpt".
Cheers,
david
--
David H. Wolfskill
uucp: ...{spsd,zardoz,felix}!dhw68k!david InterNet: david@dhw68k.cts.com