I ring the Cowbell for feedback on this scenario:

A downlink of mine wants to lovingly request all 60,000+ Usenet areas
available on my system. My system happily fufills the requests... but I had
to adjust some of my code to handle these scenarios:

- What is the maximum size of an Areafix request in Mystic?

- How many total Echomail areas can Mystic handle?

- If he chose to use Mystic, and if Mystic handles Passthru areas, does it
automatically clean-up unused passthru areas (areas with one link left, that
of the uplink). For example, this downlink gets a rescan of the last 100
messages, and most of these Usenet groups are deadwood. He decides later that
he wants to un-Areafix the deadwood from my system. Can he run some sort of
report or process on his proverbial Mystic system to do so?

The downlink ultimately wants to build a query/report of which Usenet areas
are still active and ones which have had no postings in X amount of time, as
part of a larger project he's interested in doing.

Asking because I want to recommend Mystic with its JAM storage format for this
daunting task instead of the *.MSG format D'Bridge is currently limited to.

Nick

On 10 Feb 2022 at 07:30p, Nick Andre pondered and said...
NA> I ring the Cowbell for feedback on this scenario:

what does this mean? Is cowbell some USA/Canada thing or reference to pop
culture or?

NA> A downlink of mine wants to lovingly request all 60,000+ Usenet areas
NA> available on my system. My system happily fufills the requests... but I

[snip]

NA> Asking because I want to recommend Mystic with its JAM storage format
NA> for this daunting task instead of the *.MSG format D'Bridge is currently
NA> limited to.

I looked into this some time ago thinking of using Mystic for a Usenet HUB.

NA> - What is the maximum size of an Areafix request in Mystic?

this one is big, the current mutil.ini talks of a rescan size of 999999999
messages. if you mean size of packet or arc size you can set that also or make
it unlimited.

NA> - How many total Echomail areas can Mystic handle?

This one I want to say circa 500 but I may well be wrong, I know I think least
time I played I started to hit some limits here. Ideally you want (as you
mention) 60k bases etc.

Another issue is if you are gating long named newsgroups to echomail you are
limited to the total number of characters allowed in an echomail tag. That's
where I have found the real pinch points. Sure you can get the gate to remap a
really long usenet group to a shorter echomail tag but it's not ideal and even
then you are limited to whatever total length the echomail tag is.

An inbuilt gateway into Mystic would be nice, or some way the software can
accommodate super long newsgroup names without much (or any) conversion
required.

NA> - If he chose to use Mystic, and if Mystic handles Passthru areas, does
NA> it automatically clean-up unused passthru areas (areas with one link
NA> left, that of the uplink). For example, this downlink gets a rescan of
NA> the last 100 messages, and most of these Usenet groups are deadwood. He
NA> decides later that he wants to un-Areafix the deadwood from my system.
NA> Can he run some sort of report or process on his proverbial Mystic
NA> system to do so?

I think not, and there is no passthru that I am aware of in Mystic, but you
raise a good point/question about reporting of stats for echos which is an area
I know James and I had been talking about some time back.

There is now some stats tracking in place per echonode but I'm not aware of any
stats tracking for echomail area or reporting that can (as yet) be pulled out
of Mystic using a MUTIL function.

I'd be interested in playing with anything developed above and with the NNTP
server I run that presently uses (I suspect) the same gateway tools you do.

Best, Paul

On 2022 Feb 11 15:11:26, you wrote to Nick Andre:

NA>> I ring the Cowbell for feedback on this scenario:

PH> what does this mean? Is cowbell some USA/Canada thing or reference to
PH> pop culture or?

More Cowbell - SNL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVsQLlk-T0s

When rock band Blue Oyster Cult records "(Don't Fear) the Reaper" producer
Bruce Dickinson (Christopher Walken) insists Gene Frenkle (Will Ferrell) play
more cowbell. With Chris Kattan, Chris Parnell, Horatio Sanz and Jimmy Fallon.
[Season 25, 2000]

and https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/more-cowbell/

)\/(ark

"The soul of a small kitten in the body of a mighty dragon. Look on my majesty,
ye mighty, and despair! Or bring me catnip. Your choice. Oooh, a shiny thing!"
.... We were evicted from our hole in the ground!

NA> - What is the maximum size of an Areafix request in Mystic?

Short answer is it can do what you want. But I'll expand...

Mystic will process the first 1000 lines before I decides its a troll message,
but you can use wildcards, boolean searches, and/or %ALL type commands to sub
to large numbers. There is no limitation.

NA> - How many total Echomail areas can Mystic handle?

65000 but I can easily expand that to 4 billion if needed. I just haven't
because it involves a record change, and no one has ever came close. Highest I
have seen is in the 10,000s with Mystic.

NA> - If he chose to use Mystic, and if Mystic handles Passthru areas, does
NA> it automatically clean-up unused passthru areas (areas with one link
NA> left, that of the uplink). For example, this downlink gets a rescan of
NA> the last 100 messages, and most of these Usenet groups are deadwood. He
NA> decides later that he wants to un-Areafix the deadwood from my system.
NA> Can he run some sort of report or process on his proverbial Mystic
NA> system to do so?

Yes it can do all of these things although some is just being enabled in the
A48 versions.

You can configure a threshold to interact with echomail areas based on the date
they were created and the date of the last message and then take actions which
can be any combination or all of:

1) Send a report to the SysOp with candidates for removal
2) Physically remove the base from configuration and disk
3) Automatically unsubscribe via Areafix with your uplink

The report goes to the SysOp account which will then push to mobile devices via
Internet e-mail if using those servers. If you choose to do ONLY the report,
Mystic also has options to instantly delete and unsubscribe with automatically
generated AreaFix within the Message base editor at the touch of a button. You
simply highlight the base and select "Unsubscribe" and Mystic does everything
else from removing uplinks via Areafix, removing downlinks, cleaning up
diskspace.

Or like I said, you can have Mystic automate all of it and then send you a
report of what it did.

Mystic also has automation for creating echomail areas as well when it
encounters them so it can handle automating the full lifecycle of an echo.

You can also do wildcard-based excludes from the unlinking so if you wanted FSX
network to be excluded you could say exclude any echotag that starts with FSX_
for example.

Here are some things it does in terms of hub features off the top of my head:

Automatic create of echomail/file echo areas
Automatic generation of Area/Filefix unsubscribe messages from config UI
Automatic reset of echomail stats per node after time intervals
Automatic deactivation of up/downlinks after configured node inactivity
Automatic unsubscribe of msg/file networked bases for inactive downlinks
Automatic outbound file cleanup for inactive downlinks
Automatic convert from crash to hold if connection errors threshhold is met
Automatic Areafix/Filefix request generation from config UI
Automatic SysOp Netmail generation from config UI
Automatic removal of inactive message bases including auto Areafix generation
Automatic removal of inactive file bases including Filefix generation
AES-256 encrypted Fix requests when communicating with compatible hub (no
cleartext passwords flying around).

And here is an example of a report that it generates when set to "Notify" only
scanning for dormant echomail bases:

The following bases are candidates for removal due to inactivity:

ID EchoTag Created Last Post
------ ---------------------------------------- ------------ -----------
8 SCIMYSTIC 16 Jan 2021 19 Jun 2021
14 FSX_TST 21 Oct 2021 21 Oct 2021

This feature in the current A48 is actually disabled until I finish testing the
automated delete stuff but I will make it a point to do that tonight and upload
a new version with it enabled so it'll be available within the next day or so.

On 11 Feb 2022 at 11:31a, g00r00 pondered and said...
g0> This feature in the current A48 is actually disabled until I finish
g0> testing the automated delete stuff but I will make it a point to do that
g0> tonight and upload a new version with it enabled so it'll be available
g0> within the next day or so.

very nice, lots of new things to play with there :) I will update in the coming
days.