trainedmonkey

by Jim Winstead Jr.

Colobus: an NNTP server for ezmlm and Mlmmj in Perl

a colobus.

Colobus is a news (NNTP) server written in Perl that serves up ezmlm and Mlmmd mailing list archives as newsgroups.

Colobus are very social monkeys. There are eight species of colobus that live throughout sub-saharan africa. They are also amazing jumpers.

Colobus is the software that powers the news.php.net news server. (The software for the web interface to the mailing lists uses NNTP to access the list archives.)

Colobus is free to download, use, and distribute. To install, download the source and follow the instructions in the INSTALL file.

Colobus requires the DBI, Digest::MD5, and Mail::Address Perl modules, available from CPAN.

As it says above, Colobus is free to use. but if you find it useful, I encourage you to make a donation to the World Wildlife Fund.

World Wildlife Fund

You can browse the git repository for Colobus and clone it from https://github.com/jimwins/colobus.git.

History

Ask Bjørn Hansen has further developed colobus for use on perl.org, and made his changes available on GitHub.

2.2 (released August 26, 2024)
  • allow arguments for colobus to be passed to run script
  • add -r flag to colobus-archive to reindex lists
  • fix unfolding of headers in colobus-archive (yoinked from perl's fork of colobus, fix by Robert Spier)
  • added support for a new 'xthread id_or_msgid' command to get overview (a la 'xover') for the thread that a message is in
  • support configuration of archive_pat, mailinject, and numfile to support either ezmlm or mlmmj (defaults now favor mlmmj)
  • tweak table structure to improve performance of imports and threading (patch from Robert Spier)
  • fix 'xhdr' responses and double-nested $_ (patch from Robert Spier)
2.1 (released september 4, 2004)
  • optimized use of database for overview information
2.0 (released may 15, 2004)
  • switched to DBI backend (only tested with mysql)
  • split code for updating overview database from server
  • allow location of configuration file to be specified
  • switched to bitkeeper for revision control
1.2 (released march 24, 2004)
  • change process name to show connecting IP address
  • reject cancel messages (patch from ask)
  • fixed bug in sending message that had no body
  • minor tweaks to error reporting and tracing
1.1 (released february 20, 2002)
  • added logging in a format similar to the apache httpd log format
  • added support for "xpath" command
  • added support for forcing a "Followup-To" header on postings in a specific group
  • fixed bug handling GMT and UTC format dates in "newgroups" command
1.0 (released september 18, 2001)
  • fixed response to "list overview.fmt"
  • generate and store "Lines" header
  • fix escaping of leading dots in lines when sending articles
  • allow header names in any case in "xhdr" and "xpat" commands
0.8 (released july 10, 2001)
  • added "xhdr" (and "xpat" and "xrover") command support (required by leafnode)
  • moved configuration into a configuration file
  • implemented the "newgroups" command
  • added "ihave" command support
  • rewrite Message-ID headers to always have correct case
  • fixed output of the "help" command
  • made the progress indicator for database updating prettier
  • some general code cleanup
0.7 (released july 8, 2001)
  • fixed error handling when num could not be opened
  • use first article to figure out group creation date
  • be more careful in parsing In-Reply-To header to create References
  • make sure generated message-id is used in xover
  • rewrite From headers to be compliant with rfc 1036
  • added command-line option to rebuild databases
  • fix bug that caused duplicate references headers to be sent
0.6 (released july 7, 2001)
  • initial release.

Colobus is copyright © 2001 Jim Winstead Jr. All rights reserved. See the LICENSE file in the distribution for more details.