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$Id: README,v 1.2 1998/11/11 17:26:16 roland Exp $
The Little Brother's Database
Thomas Roessler <roessler@guug.de>
This package was inspired by the Big Brother Database
package available for various Emacs mailers, and by
Brandon Long's "external query" patch for the mutt mail
user agent. (Note that this patch has been incorporated
into the main-line mutt versions as of mutt 0.93.)
The package doesn't use any formal database libraries or
languages, although it should be quite easy to extend it
to use, e.g., an installed PostgreSQL server as it's
backend.
As an additional requirement, we rely on mutt's
mutt_dotlock program to do some locking.
For querying the Little Brother, just type "lbdbq
<something>". lbdbq will now attempt to invoke various
modules to gather information about persons matching
"<something>". E.g., it may look at a list of addresses
from which you have received mail, it may look at YP maps,
or it may try to finger <something>@<various hosts>.
The behavior is configurable: Upon startup, lbdbq will
source the shell scripts
/etc/lbdb.rc
$HOME/.lbdbrc
$HOME/.lbdb/lbdbrc
$HOME/.lbdb/rc
if they exist.
They can be used to set the following global variables:
- MODULE_PATH: Where lbdbq should look for modules
- METHODS: What modules to use.
Note that there _are_ defaults, so you should most
probably modify these variables using constructs like this:
MODULE_PATH="MODULE_PATH $HOME/lbdb_modules"
Additionally, modules may have configuration variables of
their own.
Currently, two modules are supplied with lbdb:
- m_finger: This module will use finger to find out
something more about a person. The list of hosts do be
asked is configurable; use the M_FINGER_HOSTS variable.
Note that "localhost" will mean an invocation of your
local finger(1) binary, and should thus work even if you
don't provide the finger service to the network.
m_finger tries to find out the machines mail domain name
by parsing a sendmail.cf file (if it finds one ;-) and
by reading /etc/hostname and /etc/HOSTNAME. You may
want to add more methods. See also lbdb_lib.sh.in.
- m_inmail: This module will look up user name fragments
in a list of mail addresses. To create this list, put
the following lines into your ~/.procmailrc:
:0hc
| lbdb-fetchaddr
This will pipe a copy of every mail message you receive
through a small C program which grabs that message's
From: header. lbdb-fetchaddr will then construct an
address list out of these data. This list is stored
under $HOME/.lbdb/m_inmail.
Feel free to create your own modules to query LDAP
servers, YP maps, and the like. m_finger should be a good
example of how to do it.
If you create your own modules or have other changes and
feel that they could be helpful for others, don't hesitate
to submit them to me for inclusion in later releases.
Finally, to use lbdbq from mutt, add the following line to
your ~/.muttrc:
set query_command="lbdbq %s"
CREDITS
-------
Most of the really interesting code of this program
(namely, the RFC 822 address parser used by
lbdb-fetchaddr) was stolen from Michael Elkins' mutt mail
user agent. Additional credits go to Brandon Long for
putting the query functionality into mutt.
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