Confusing output from innreport/controlchan

[Russ Allbery]

Bettina Fink <laura at hydrophil.de> writes:

> from one of my news.daily reports:

> Control Channel:
> Sender                    newgroup  rmgroup  Other  Bad PGP   DoIt   OK
> Dr_Roy_Batty at hotmail.com         2        0      0      0      0      2
> ed_cat_98 at NoSpamyahoo.com        2        0      0      0      0      0
> edhew at xenitec.on.ca              1        0      0      0      0      1
> group-admin at isc.org              2        4      0      0      6      6
> tyork at durge.org                  2        0      0      0      0      2

> TOTAL                            9        4      0      0      6     11

> The machine uses pgpverify. On that day, only one group was created
> (comp.os.linux.embedded), that's perfectly ok, the rest was unwanted/
> rubbish (except the biz.* checkgroups from edhew at xenitec.on.ca which
> seems to be dropped because it contains both Control and Supersedes
> header).

> But especially the "DoIt" and "OK" section is very confusing. What does
> it want to tell me? Just having the "Control Channel" section, I'm not
> able to say how many groups were really created/removed. Can someone
> teach me how to read that? ;-)

Yeah, I've been having problems with that too.  :)  I just now went and
looked at the code, and I think the reason why it's confusing is because
controlchan only logs what it can find out about the message before
passing it to the handler.  So a newgroup for a group you already carry is
logged the same as a newgroup that your server had to act on.

The OK column is nothing more or less than the count of control messages
that had Approved headers, as near as I can tell.  The DoIt column is
whether the action for this control message was "doit" or not, so those
are the messages that would have been acted on if their action were
necessary.

I agree, I think it could stand some fiddling....

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>