Using LinkController: Administration

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# 14. Administration

There are various aspects of administration. This is mostly related to testing links.

> 14.1 Default Installation |  |
> 14.2 User Administration |  |
> 14.3 Cron Scripts |  |

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## 14.1 Default Installation

Running `default-install -all` should set everything up correctly. There are various variations on this command which do different things, but the summary is

- Create a linkcont userid and group which will be used for running programs
- Create a working directory where LinkController will keep it's data
- Create configuration files, especially /etc/link-control.pl
- Create cron scripts which will run LinkController automatically.

Using this command it is also possible to activate users and groups e.g. `default-install -user username` or `default-install -group groupname` in which case the specified users will become a member of the lcntusr group.

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## 14.2 User Administration

User administration is really only needed if you are running link testing centrally for your users. This makes sense since it means that if several users have a link to the same place (likely in any given site) then you will only have to check that link once.

In this case, the important question is which links are copied into the checking database. This is controlled by the program `copy-links-from-users` and decides copies data from users which are in the `lnkusr` group.

The command `default-install` can be used to manipulate which users are in the group e.g. `default-install -user username` or `default-install -group groupname` in which case the specified users will become a member of the lcntusr group.

Another form of user administration is limitation on which users have access to the database. This can be done with normal file permissions. There isn't any specific control to stop users from seeing which links other users have put into the database.

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## 14.3 Cron Scripts

In order to be effective, link testing should be done every day. Furthermore, it is a good idea to do the testing at low usage times, which normally means at night. For this reason normally a cron script will be used.

- copy the links from each user with `copy-links-from-users`
- add them to the database with `extract-links --in-url-list`
- build a schedule for testing the links with `build-schedule`
- test the links with `test-link`

The other thing which is done is to remove old links from the database. This only needs to be done weekly.

The program `default-install` can create these scripts.

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This document was generated by Michael De La Rue on December, 30 2001 using texi2html