Mystic Utilities, otherwise known as “MUTIL”, is an automated maintenance and utility program that is controlled by .ini configuration file(s).

Think of MUTIL as the Swiss Army Knife utility program for Mystic BBS. It can be tasked with running multiple functions at once or be configured in a far more granular fashion to do one task at a time when called.

The syntax to execute MUTIL is:

MUTIL <configuration-filename>[.ini]

If no configuration file is supplied, then MUTIL will look for mutil.ini in the same directory it resides.

You can also supply a second parameter -NOSCREEN that will turn off screen updates but the configuration file parameter MUST be supplied first e.g.

mutil msgmaint.ini -NOSCREEN

If no file extension is provided on the command line, MUTIL will append .ini onto it, meaning that executing the following command line will cause mutil to look for “msgmaint.ini”:

mutil msgmaint

MUTIL is completely driven by Sysop-created .ini files which contain general configuration options, and a list of functions in which MUTIL should perform. This allows a System Operator to easily create their own custom “commands” that can execute one or many tasks, simply by invoking MUTIL and passing it the .ini name.

For example, a SysOp may decide to create a “msgmaint.ini” file which instructs MUTIL to do various functions such as purging message bases by message age, renumbering and packing the message base data files, and so on. Once this .ini file is created, those configured functions can be performed simply my invoking MUTIL with the .ini filename as described above:

 mutil msgmaint

Each .ini file has a [General] stanza with some options, followed by a list of functions that can be enabled. Lets take a look at the general options before jumping into the specific functions:

The general stanza contains several options you should consider and/or configure further:

This can be a handy option to set if you want to run MUTIL from a directory other than the root Mystic directory you have installed Mystic in to or from that which has been specified in the mysticbbs environment variable.

In most cases if you are running Mystic BBS in the default directory you won't want to change this. If you do opt to change this remember to uncomment it by removing the semicolon first!

; mystic_directory=c:\mystic\mystic.dat

Mystic BBS offers a number of logging tools. For MUTIL you get to tell Mystic what the name of the log file it creates should be called. If no directory is specified in the logfile name, MUTIL will attempt to use the configured LOGS directory from Mystic's main configuration.

If you wish you can comment out the line below to disable logging completely.

logfile=mutil.log

The next setting defines the level of detail to be contained within the MUTIL logs. Usually level 2 provides an acceptable level of detail but you can change this to one of three options:

Level 1 = basic
Level 2 = verbose
Level 3 = debug

loglevel=2

Not only can you decide on the name of your MUTIL logging file, you can opt to set how it is time stamped. The logging defaults to NNN DD HH:II:SS if the setting below is not enabled. To override the default time stamp settings you will need to uncomment this line.

;logstamp = YYYYHHMMHHIISS

Next you can define the number of log files to keep (0 to disable log rolling)

maxlogfiles = 3

And lastly you can define the size of each log file in kilobytes

maxlogsize = 1000

Remember if you are going to create different .ini files for various functions listed below you may want to settle on standardizing your general options at the start of each .ini file.

Things can get rather confusing (unless you like it that way) when logging levels, logging file names etc. change between .ini files that MUTIL inspects when it is called.

In the end how you choose to set things up is entirely up to you. That's the beauty of Mystic - it's so flexible!

There are number of functions able to be called when using MUTIL.

Each function is enabled or disabled in the [general] stanza section of the .ini file by toggling the following switches to true or false.

[general]

Import_FIDONET.NA  = false
Import_MessageBase = false 
Import_FILEBONE.NA = false
Import_FILES.BBS   = false
MassUpload         = false
GenerateTopLists   = false
GenerateAllFiles   = false
PostTextFiles      = false
PurgeMessageBases  = false
PackMessageBases   = false
ImportEchoMail     = false
ExportEchoMail     = false
MergeNodeLists     = false 
FileToss           = false 
PackFileBases      = false 
LinkMessages	   = false 

NOTE: All options are assumed to be off (or false) by default. Only the options being executed in a particular .ini file are required to be found within the [general] stanza.

For each function enabled in the [general] stanza, a corresponding stanza with the same name must exist for that function. In order words, if you have “MassUpload = true” in your .ini file, then you must also have a “[MassUpload]” stanza in the same .ini file.

While the [general] stanza defines the general options such as logging and which functions to execute, the function-specific stanzas define the options specific to that particular function. These function-specific stanzas are defined in their own individual sections, with links found below or on the sidebar index.

• Importing FILES.BBS and similar into File Bases
• Purge Message bases (by age and max messages)
• Pack and renumber message base
• Export Binkley-style FLO echomail/netmail
• Pack and check integrity of file base listings
• Merge nodelists into Mystic format

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