Using LinkController: Link Database Maintenance

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# 16. Link Database Maintenance

For the most part the link database shouldn't need much maintenance. There are a number of cases where it might, however. If it becomes corrupt, you may try the db_recover command. Probably, however, it's just better to recover the database and link checking schedule from a recent backup. Time is not really critical since the work is normally easy to regenerate. You should make sure that link checking doesn't run in at the time you do backups, however.

The other thing is that occasionally you may want to recover space in the link database by dumping and un-dumping it. See the Berkeley database documentation for more details.

> 16.1 Link Ageing |  |

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## 16.1 Link Ageing

Sometimes we have a link which is no longer in use within our infostructure. However, it's not a good idea to throw away information about it immediately. It could be that certain files have been temporarily deleted and will come back. Alternatively, a link could have been found broken and been corrected, but someone has a copy of the old page. When they re-install the copy, we will have to deal with that link again.

If we had not kept that link around and they immediately do a link check on their document they may see nothing wrong, and, because of the nature of link-controller, we won't start reporting the link as broken until we have confirmed that it really is, some days later.

If, on the other hand, we keep checking all of the links which are aged, we will cause ourselves considerable extra work.

To handle this, links are aged. Once a link has reached greater than a certain age, the link will not be checked any more. Once the link has reached a much larger age, it will be completely deleted from the link database. The age is reset each time the link is extracted from the infostructure, so links which are still in use will continue to be checked.

In the meantime, the link will still be repeatedly scheduled based to it's normal checking time. This causes us to examine it quite regularly, but that is okay, since we will do almost no work when we look at it.

By default links which have not been refreshed will be ignored after one week and will be deleted from the database after two months.

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This document was generated by Michael De La Rue on January, 6 2002 using texi2html