4. GNATS Administration

In daily usage, GNATS is self-maintaining. However, there are various administrative duties which need to be performed periodically. Also, requirements may change with time, so it may be necessary to make changes to the GNATS configuration at some point:

emptying the pending directory

If a Problem Report arrives with a Category value that is unrecognized by the ‘categories’ file, or if that field is missing, GNATS places the PR in the ‘pending’ directory (see section Where GNATS lives). PRs submitted in free-form by email will always be filed in the ‘pending’ directory. If so configured, GNATS sends a notice to the gnats-admin and to the party responsible for that submitter (as listed in the ‘submitters’ file) when this occurs.

To have these "categoryless" PRs filed correctly, you can then use a GNATS tool such as edit-pr to set the correct category of each PR in the ‘pending’ directory.

In order to protect yourself from problems caused by full disks, you should arrange to have all mail that is sent to the GNATS database copied to a log file (Setting up mail aliases). Then, should you run out of disk space, and an empty file ends up in the database’s ‘pending’ directory, you need only look in the log file, which should still contain the full message that was submitted.

adding another database

GNATS supports multiple databases. If you find at some point that you need to add another database to your server, the mkdb tool does most of the work for you. See section Adding another database.

adding new categories

Most installations of GNATS will only require you to add a new line to the ‘categories’ file. The category directory will then be created automatically as needed. However, if automatic directory creation has been switched off in the ‘dbconfig’ file (see section The dbconfig file), you need to use the ‘mkcat’ program.

removing categories

To remove a category, you need to make sure the relevant subdirectory is empty (in other words, make sure no PRs exist for the category you wish to remove). You can then remove the category listing from the ‘categories’ file, and invoke

rmcat category…

to remove category (any number of categories may be specified on the command line to rmcat, so long as they abide by the above constraints).

adding and removing maintainers

Edit the ‘responsible’ file to add a new maintainer or to remove an existing maintainer. See section The responsible file.

building a new index

If your index becomes corrupted, or if you wish to generate a new one for some reason, use the program gen-index (see section Regenerating the index).

pruning log files

Log files often grow to unfathomable proportions. As with gardening, it is best to prune these as they grow, lest they take over your disk and leave you with no room to gather more Problem Reports. If you keep log files, be sure to keep an eye on them. (See section Setting up mail aliases.)

BACKING UP YOUR DATA

Any database is only useful if its data remains uncorrupted and safe. Performing periodic backups ensures that problems like disk crashes and data corruption are reversible.

See section Where GNATS lives.

This document was generated by Chad Walstrom on March 3, 2015 using texi2html 1.82.