[Dxspider-support] export_user command

[Dirk Koopman]

On Thu, 2004-10-28 at 10:33 -0400, Bill Coleman N2BC wrote:
> My DXSpider cluster has been quite well behaved for eons.  Most recent
> changes are a switch to K1EA for spot feeds and updated WINXP to SP2.
> Over the past couple weeks the 10G harddrive has filled twice.
>  
> The users_asc file was 7Gb in both cases.
>  
> Now I see that the base CRONTAB file has an export-user command in it.
> I have commented it out.  I have also deleted the 5 generations of
> users_asc (the .o, .oo, .ooo  etc.).
>  
> Another observation, my users.V3 is 8Mb - I thought (dangerous) that
> this would only have my registered users, but it obviously has many
> many more.
>  
> So, finally, to my questions:
>  
> 1) Is there something abberant about my users.V3 file?

Almost certainly, yes, there is. But the way to find out what that is is
to do an export_user command and then to study the output.

It is a shame that you have removed all the .oooo files (I am presuming
that these where a lot smaller than 7Gb).

To give you some idea of what is 'normal' here is a listing of my data
directory:-

-rw-rw-r--   1 djk djk 31039488 Oct 14 11:42 usdb.v1
-rw-rw-r--   1 djk djk 12769128 Oct 27 01:02 user_asc
-rw-rw-r--   1 djk djk 12751956 Oct 20 01:02 user_asc.o
-rw-rw-r--   1 djk djk 12724503 Oct 13 01:02 user_asc.oo
-rw-rw-r--   1 djk djk 12693723 Oct  6 01:02 user_asc.ooo
-rw-rw-r--   1 djk djk 12672537 Sep 29 01:02 user_asc.oooo
-rw-rw-r--   1 djk djk 12645141 Sep 22 01:02 user_asc.ooooo
-rw-rw-r--   1 djk djk 23310336 Oct 29 14:53 users.v3

You need to know that my users.v3 is the result of 5 years of
accumulation in a point of the network that sees every PC41 that goes
around the world.

> 2) What is the purpose of the export_user command in the base CRONTAB
> file?  I cannot find a companion import function for rebuild or ???

The admin manual tells you how, but basically:

1. stop the node.
2. perl user_asc
3. note the errors.
4. restart the node.

The user_asc is the exported version of your user file. It allows you to
rebuild it. It has some simple validation in it.

If you had a .oo or earlier file that was a more reasonable size I would
recommend doing the above, as I think your user file is, in some way,
corrupt.

However, if you manually do 'export_asc' and then look at the result, it
should be obvious what is wrong with it. It should be possible to edit
out the the rubbish. Alternatively, the validation may just ignore the
duff records.

Lines look like:

 2E1GTC  bless( {qth => 'Wymondham',lang => 'en',lat => '52.5625',name
=> 'Andrew',node => 'GB7TLH',qra => 'JO02NN',group => ['loca
l'],sort => 'U',homenode => 'GB7TLH',long => '1.125',call =>
'2E1GTC',lastin => '920711434'}, 'DXUser' )

You can delete any complete line and that entry will not be imported.
Please don't fiddle with any of the data within a line unless you really
do know what you are doing.

Dirk G1TLH
-- 
Dirk Koopman <djk at tobit.co.uk>