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Subsections

• Exploder lists
• Exploder archives
• Web interface to the exploder archives
• See also

AIPS++ email exploders

This section describes how the AIPS++ electronic mail exploders are set up.

Exploder lists

The sources of the AIPS++ exploder lists reside in $(AIPSCODE)/admin/system in files with a .list suffix, for example aips2-workers.list. AIPS++ programmers may modify these lists using ao (p) and ai (p) to check them in and out like any other source file. The lists are installed in $(MSTRETCD) by the $(MSTRETCD) makefile which is invoked by exhale (p) several times a day.

AIPS++ exploder email is addressed to nrao.edu, for example aips2-workers@nrao.edu. NRAO's email system is set up so that this mail is received by aips2.nrao.edu, the AIPS++ master host, which distributes email to the list by virtue of entries of the following form in /etc/aliases

   aips2-workers: :include:/export/aips++/master/etc/aips2-workers.list

Exploder archives

The first entry in every AIPS++ exploder list is an email alias which is used to archive a copy of the mail. These aliases have names of the form *-log, where the asterisk corresponds to the exploder name. For example, aips2-workers.list contains aips2-workers-log.

The -log aliases are defined in /etc/aliases on aips2.nrao.edu so that the received mail is piped to a utility, aipsmail (p), which does the archiving using the publically available MH (message handler) system. For example, the entry for the aips2-workers exploder is

   aips2-workers-log: "| /export/aips++/master/etc/aipsmail aips2-workers"

The MH folders reside in directories of the same name as the exploder in the Mail directory beneath aips2adm's home directory. For example the aips2-workers archive resides in

   /export/aips++/Mail/aips2-workers

MH stores each email in a separate file in this directory and gives them numerical names corresponding to the sequence number of the message.

Mail which is more than 14 days old is deleted from the aips2-inhale exploder every evening by an aips2adm cron job running on aips2.nrao.edu.

Web interface to the exploder archives

The MH mail folders in which the exploder archives reside are made publically accessible on the web via a symlink in the httpd DocumentRoot directory (/home/tarzan, see section §13.1):

   /home/tarzan/aips++/mail -> /export/aips++/Mail

The AIPS++ home page contains a link to an HTML document, $(AIPSDOCS)/html/email.html, which in turn contains links to email folder indexes generated by scanhtml (p). scanhtml invokes the MH scan command to produce an index and then converts it to HTML. scanhtml is invoked by aipsmail whenever it receives mail so the indexes are always current.

Apart from containing links to each item of exploder mail, the indexes also contain links to the currently installed copies of the exploder lists, and a link to a form which allows searching of the exploder archive.

The link to the exploder list is implemented via a unix symbolic link called list within the mail folder directory. For example

   /export/aips++/Mail/aips2-workers/list -> ../../master/etc/aips2-workers.list

Mail searching is implemented via a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) script, pickhtml (p), which generates an HTML form to obtain options for another CGI script, scanpick (p). scanpick invokes the MH pick command to search the archive folder and converts the pick output to an HTML index. The CGI scripts are web-enabled via symlinks in the httpd ScriptAlias directory (/home/tarzan/httpd/cgi-bin):

   /home/tarzan/httpd/cgi-bin/pickhtml -> /export/aips++/master/etc/pickhtml
   /home/tarzan/httpd/cgi-bin/scanpick -> /export/aips++/master/etc/scanpick

Refer to the AIPS++ email exploder web page for a list of currently active exploders.

See also

The unix manual page for cron(1).
The manual page for mh(1), the message handler system.
The manual page for pick(1), the MH search command.
The manual page for scan(1), the MH index command.
AIPS++ code management configuration (§1.1.4).
AIPS++ variable names (§1.2).
Section §1.4, AIPS++ accounts and groups.
ai (p) AIPS++ code checkin utility.
ao (p) AIPS++ code checkout utility.
exhale (p), AIPS++ code export utility.
Section §13.1, AIPS++ master web services.
aipsmail (p), AIPS++ email exploder archive utility.
pickhtml (p), AIPS++ HTML form generator for scanpick.
scanhtml (p), AIPS++ HTML indexing utility for exploder email.
scanpick (p), AIPS++ HTML interface to pick.
Common Gateway Interface.