CONTROLCHAN(8)

💅 CONTROLCHAN(8) — the control message handler that eats, and it's channel-fed, bestie

okay so real talk: this one lives in section 8 of the InterNetNews docs, and honestly? it's lowkey the main character of control message handling. let's get into it 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

controlchan — a channel-fed control message handler. that's it, that's the vibe. 👑

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

controlchan [-ch]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so here's the tea: controlchan takes the whole job of handling control messages away from innd — like, it removes that responsibility entirely — and instead it processes them from a channel or a file feed. the one exception? cancels. those it does not deal with. periodt.

💀 heads up: the two Perl modules Encode and MIME::Parser are required by controlchan. no cap, you need both.

to reduce load (we love an efficient queen), controlchan keeps a copy of control.ctl and control.ctl.local in memory and checks permissions — including any required PGP headers, yes ma'am — before any scripts get called. and the way that it just… automatically reloads those two configuration files when it notices they've been modified? iconic. ✨

also! the default case of an unrecognized control article gets handled internally, and the "drop" case is handled with far less fuss. we simply don't stress about it. 🙈

normally, controlchan is invoked by innd as configured in newsfeeds. here's an example entry, bestie — copy it exactly:

controlchan!\
    :!*,control,control.*,!control.cancel\
    :AC,Tc,Wnsm\
    :<pathbin in inn.conf>/controlchan

make sure the newsgroup "control.cancel" exists, okay? that way controlchan doesn't have to scan through cancels, which — plot twist — it wouldn't be processing anyway. 💅

you can also manually invoke controlchan with just a path to a file (one that contains a complete control article, headers and body included), or with a token on its standard input:

echo '/path/to/a/control/article' | controlchan
echo '@0303465234000000000000235AE000000002@' | controlchan

🌈 now listen, this next bit is in the (very, very unlikely) event that you need to process ihave/sendme control messages: be sure that logipaddr is set to false in inn.conf, because in this case controlchan needs a site name, not an IP address. fr fr, don't skip this one.

and finally: controlchan tries to report all log messages through syslog(3) — unless it's connected to an interactive terminal, in which case it does its own thing. 🎀

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💖 OPTIONS 💖

• -c — by default, controlchan does not process articles whose Date or Injection-Date header fields are too far in the past (more than artcutoff days, as set in inn.conf) or one day in the future. this is all about preventing a malicious replay of old control articles, and honestly? protective queen behavior. 🛡️ using the -c flag disables this check on the cutoff date.
• -h — gives usage information. short, sweet, helpful. 🌸

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🧚 HISTORY 🧚

written by Katsuhiro Kondou <kondou@nec.co.jp> for InterNetNews. converted to POD by Julien Elie. legends only. 👑

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⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

• control.ctl(5)
• inn.conf(5)

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and that's the whole page, bestie 💜 this lil gem is from INN 2.7.4, dated 2025-03-29 — so go forth, handle those control messages, and slay 💅✨