Table of Contents

NAME

yawgmoth - helper for mcxmit concerning group selection

SYNOPSIS

yawgmoth [-h]
yawgmoth [-a acl-file] [-c config] [-d level]

DESCRIPTION

Yawgmoth is a daemon process that listens for incoming (local) connections from mcxmit programs and tells them after getting a group list on what multicast groups and udp port they should send their articles.

The second purpose is to send packets with group assignments to the IPmulticast group 224.0.1.51 That has been assigned by IANA as mcntpdirectory for this purpose . These packets are interpret by mcrcv(8) to get the information where they can get what newsgroup from. For a informations about these packets see groupdump(1).

Options to yawgmoth are:

-h
Displays help and exits then.
-a acl-file
Load an access control list from file acl-file and apply the acl to incoming packets. If they are not covered by the list, they are thrown away.
-c config
Read the in config specified configuration file instead of the default yawgmoth.conf
-d level
Yawgmoth does not detach from it's controlling tty, but instead prints every received packet to stdout. Increasing level augments the verbosity of the output.

This section describes the format of the yawgmoth.conf file: Each line is one entry. Lines that are empty or start with a hash sign (#) are treated as comment lines. Subentries on a line are separated by a colon (:) There are basically two types of entries: the ME entry and normal group entries. The ME entry must come before the first group entry.

The ME line has the following format:

ME:ttl:id

Ttl gives the ttl for the announcement packets (that is how far they will be distributed). The ttl value also serves as a upper bound for the ttl of the group entries. The ``id'' is the id of the host, yawgmoth is running on. Id can be the entry that the hosts puts on the ``Path:'' line or the fully qualified hostname.

The other entries are in the form:

ngroup:startgroup:numgroups:ttl:action

The meaning of the entries is as follows:

ngroup
The newsgroups this line should apply to in wildmat(3) format. An newsgroup name of * is considered as a fall through that is if no other entry matches, then this value is taken

(the * matches all).

ttl
The ttl, at which multicast packets for the specifyed newsgroup get sent. If this is larger than the ttl on the ``ME'' line then it is lowered to that value.
The startgroup, numgroups and action fields are not yet evaluated (but in the next version).

EXAMPLES

Example yawgmoth.conf:

ME:32:news.some.site.do.main
# comment line
ka.*:239.1.2.1:4:8:go
comp.*:227.1.1.1:2:64:stop
*:228.1.1.1:100:64:go

Note that the ttl in the ``comp'' line is bigger than the ttl in the ``ME'' line and therefore gets stripped down to the value of the ``ME'' line.

FILES

yawgmoth.conf -- main configuration file for yawgmoth.

SEE ALSO

acltest(1), groupdump(1), mcrcv(8), mcxmit(8), netstat(1), tcpdump(8) acl(3)

HISTORY

The name is after a card from the card trading game Magic the Gathering (see Wizards of the coast) as Andrea Warzel (neg@pilhuhn.de) thought, that one can't call a daemon mcctld (which was its first name from multicast control daemon) as such a daemon would always commit suicide because of its name. The name that was given next was erwin. But can you think of a daemon called erwin?

AUTHOR

Heiko W.Rupp (hwr@pilhuhn.de)

BUGS

None known yet.

Table of Contents

97/10/06 hwr