Dr Andrew Scott G7VAV

MBCS, MIET, Member ACM, Member IEEE

Senior Lecturer
School of Computing
and Communications

D35 InfoLab21
Lancaster University
Lancaster, LA1 4WA
United Kingdom

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MM

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: 21 April 1993
Index Return to Main Contents

NAME

mm - mirror master

SYNOPSIS

mm [flags] [package-files]

DESCRIPTION

mm is the mirror master. It runs multiple calls to mirror in parallel and handles locking and minimal retry times.

As with mirror, mm is a package written in Perl.

mm presumes that all the package details are stored in a directory called packages. All the packages for a given site must be in a file whose name is the same as that of the site. So in packages/sunsite.org.uk will be all the package details for the host sunsite.org.uk.

OPTIONS

-t: Ignore the minimal retry timers.
-o site:package: Only mirror the given site:package.
-debug: Enable debugging. If this argument is given more than once the debugging level will increase. Currently the maximum useful level is four.
-s: Enable status debugging. This will print out the status of any subprocess as it is spawned or as it exits.

CONFIGURATION FILE

The configuration file is parsed as a series of statements. Blank lines and lines beginning with a hash are ignored. There are are two kinds of statements, controls and site:package details.

Control statements are of the form:

: keyword=value

You can add whitespace around the equals.

Here is a list of the keywords and their values, any defaults are given inside square brackets:

home: Directory that mm chdirs to before doing any work. ['']
max: Maximum number of mirrors that can be running in parallel at any one time ['6']
mirror: This is the way to call mirror. Any occurence of $args, $package or $site is replace with the appropriate entry from the package. Any $pkg is replaced with a version of $package with all characters that cause problems in filenames converted to underscore. The default is: exec ./mirror \$args -p'\$package' packages/\$site > logs/\$site:\$pkg 2>&1 ['']
cmd: Run the given command. This can occur multiple times. ['']
cmdin: Run the given command and use its output as mm input. This can occur multiple times. ['']
skip: Skip the given site:package when it occurs. ['']

In addition to control statements there are also package details. Each package details statement is of the form:

site:package min-restart-last-ok min-restart-last-notok mirror-args

The site and package fields are matched against those in the packages. A mirror will only be run to this site:package if the last mirror run was more than min hours out. The min-restart-last-ok limit will be used if the last call to mirror was successful. If the mirror call failed then min-restart-last-notok will be used.

EXAMPLES

Here is a simple mm input file to manage mirroring two packages.

home=/public/mirror

ftp.cl.cam.ac.uk:JIPS-nrs 20 20
hcrl.open.ac.uk:hcrl-psion 20 20

More usually the auxilly program pkgs_to_mmin will be used to automatically convert the contents of the packages directory into the site:package statements.

home=/public/mirror

cmdin=./pkgs_to_mmin packages/*

AUTHOR

Written by Lee McLoughlin <lmjm@icparc.ic.ac.uk>.

for client (none)

http://www.andrew-scott.uk/

Andrew Scott

http://www.andrew-scott.co.uk/