🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello all! As I have a crappy newsserver at Compuserve(*), I always try to
find new public servers, and test them... recently I had problems with two
different types of servers(a&b):

    -a) INN 1.4 unoff3 (and perhaps unoff4): the "NEWNEWS list.of.groups
date time GMT" command used by NOS to get a list of messageIDs does not
work properly... I recieve a complete list of *all* articles the server
has in the requested groups, not only articles recieved after date/time...
This is a big problem, because even if I maintain a history file of 2000
IDs, NOS will download very old articles I recieved yet 2-3 weeks ago...
maintain a bigger history file (3000 IDs? 4000?) is not a good thing, as
it is much slower for NOS to scan duplicates.

    Even with 2000 IDs in history, the scanning is very slow when the
NEWNEWS gives me 600 or 800 IDs, for in the end only download 50 really
new articles... about 20 to 30 minutes for the complete process! And this
after having done a nntp session with compuserve, downloading 150 articles
in about 3 to 4 minutes...

    I dont know why, but sometimes NOS seems to scan history for
duplicates very quickly, say 20-30 duplicates per second (in memory?), and
sometimes much more slowly (on disk?) at a rate around only 2 duplicates
found per second. Someone knows how to force NOS to scan in memory? The
strange thing is I would say it's not dependent of the lenght of the
lists, but of the number of nntp session already done in the same
connexion... I get news from 4 servers each time, the last 2 sessions are
always slow.

    Thanks God, the batch mode is on, with 24 buffers, so NOS continues to
retrieve not duplicates messages while scanning... but when each article
comes at 1500-2000 CPS, the whole process gives me an average 100 CPS...

    Someone knows if this NEWNEWS command date problem is a known bug in
the unoff(icial) versions of the INN server program? Is there a way round?
For the moment I call these servers only for 1 or 2 important groups, not
for all I want... (if you are curious an exemple of these servers is
ns.felk.cvut.cz).

    -b) NetManage NNS X 2.07 A. I recently found a french server very good
to get my fr.* groups as it has *only* this hierarchy, but with an expire
of something like a month, when news.compuserve.com expires fr.* groups
after 2 or 3 days (if you are curious it's news.dyadel.net). Great! Oh
no... It doesn't work... It gives a "NNTP Error while getting NEWNEWS
(response was 500)"... I tried to connect thru telnet on port 119 (telnet
news.dyadel.net 119), and typed "help", and this program doesn't have a
NEWNEWS command at all!

    Excuse me for this lengthy article, I resume my questions:
1) INN 1.4unoff4: NEWNEWS known bug? way round?
2) how to speed up NOS scanning for duplicates?
3) servers without NEWNEWS command: way round?
4) in Oasis2, is it possible to scan multiple servers for different
groups?
5) when will pubnews.demon.co.uk be back to service?
6) is there a reliable public newsserver, using official INN 1.4 or even
official INN 1.5 (I don't know if it's released yet?) carying all groups?

    Thank you very much if you can help me! bye..

Footnotes:
(*) the compuserve newsserver has many many groups (15139 at 1 May) but
looses many many articles in each... a triple problem: bad sync between
the 12 or 14 servers (scalable newsserver I think it's called) hidden
behind the DNS generic name news.compuserve.com, bad feed organization,
and very low expire delay in certain groups...
__

	/* Bruno Kozlowski 100710.1360@compuserve.com */
	/* -==- A happy Falcon owner from france -==- */