Using LinkController: Testing

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# 6. Testing Links

If you are using someone else's link information then you may be able to skip this part and go straight on to the next one on generating reports.

Testing links takes a long time. To begin to detect broken ones will take about ten days. This is a deliberate feature of LinkController. It is designed this way firstly to give people at the other end of links a chance to repair their resources and secondly to reduce the amount of network bandwidth LinkController uses at a given time and so its impact on other people's Internet usage.

The key program which you want to use is `test-link`. I run this from a shell script which directs its output to a log file

FIXME actually I now just use a cron job.

    #!/bin/sh
    #this is just a little sample script of how I run the program.

    LOGDIR=$HOME/log
    test-link >> \
            $LOGDIR/runlog-`/bin/date +%Y-%m-%d`.log 2>&1
    #assumes the use of a gnu style date command which can print
    #out full dates.

And I run this shell script from my ``crontab'` with a command like this

    42 02 * * *     /..directories./run-daily-test.sh

The string `/..directories./` should be replaced with the directory where you have the script. Remember to make the script executable.

This will now run until completion each night. However, you should make sure that it does actually finish. If you have too many links to check in the given time, then you can end up with a backlog and the system will take a long time to stop. To avoid this, either make testing less frequent or make checking run faster. This will have to be done by editing the program itself at present.

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