🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm having problems with article numbering in news-groups served
up by freeserve to leafnode-1.9.10. Things started to go wrong on
Jan 24th 2000, when freeserve's news-servers seemed to be down.

When I eventually got hold of a news-server, leafnode didn't
like anything on offer and skipped all news-groups. Later, it
downloaded some news, but restarted the article numbers from 1.

Since then there's been a few more hiccoughs and articles have
sequenced into two separate series within the same news-groups.

I've just done a fetchnews -f and found the same problems with
article numbering in /var/spool/news/leaf.node/groupinfo.

For example:
/var/spool/news/leaf.node/news.freeserve.co.uk dated 03:23 04 Mar 2000
has the entry
    uk.comp.os.linux 71815
		     ^^^^^
But:
/var/spool/news/leaf.node/groupinfo downloaded at 03:23 04 Mar 2000
has the entry
    uk.comp.os.linux 1709 1 0 Discussion of the Linux operating system
		     ^^^^
Here are some of the logged messages from leafnode for the ucol
news-group: (I've added extra newlines to this)

Jan 20 02:22:35 marimba fetchnews[22177]:
	uk.comp.os.linux: 145 articles fetched (to 65075), 0 killed
Jan 24 04:03:22 marimba fetchnews[32722]:
	skip uk.comp.os.linux (948686599): 607953, 1490065
Jan 24 04:33:54 marimba fetchnews[14]:
	uk.comp.os.linux: 473 articles fetched (to 474), 0 killed
Jan 26 02:10:07 marimba fetchnews[4248]:
	uk.comp.os.linux: 285 articles fetched (to 65360), 0 killed

... and again ...

Feb 20 17:59:25 marimba fetchnews[32494]:
	uk.comp.os.linux: 85 articles fetched (to 68822), 0 killed
Feb 23 03:54:52 marimba fetchnews[7377]:
	skip uk.comp.os.linux (951278083): 208673, 208673
Feb 23 04:02:12 marimba fetchnews[7405]:
	uk.comp.os.linux: 438 articles fetched (to 912), 0 killed
Feb 24 19:39:53 marimba fetchnews[10988]:
	uk.comp.os.linux: 231 articles fetched (to 1143), 0 killed
Feb 28 02:12:45 marimba fetchnews[18420]:
	skip uk.comp.os.linux (951703958): 425846, 425846
Feb 28 04:05:21 marimba fetchnews[19092]:
	uk.comp.os.linux: 331 articles fetched (to 1474), 0 killed
Feb 29 01:44:01 marimba fetchnews[20979]:
	uk.comp.os.linux: 124 articles fetched (to 68946), 0 killed
Mar  2 00:06:03 marimba fetchnews[25245]:
	uk.comp.os.linux: 177 articles fetched (to 69232), 0 killed
Mar  2 03:27:21 marimba fetchnews[25996]:
	skip uk.comp.os.linux (951967637): 178355, 178355
Mar  2 03:28:24 marimba fetchnews[26013]:
	uk.comp.os.linux: 13 articles fetched (to 1487), 0 killed
Mar  3 21:32:31 marimba fetchnews[29546]:
	uk.comp.os.linux: 193 articles fetched (to 1680), 0 killed

My news-reader (xrn) thinks the last article seen was no. 69232, as
recorded in my ~/.newsrc, so its shown no new articles to me for
the last day or two.

I presume leafnode skips a news-group because freeserve offers
it crazy article numbers. Why does this happen?
Is it my setup, or freeserve's news-servers?
Is there a fix I should know about?

Ted.
-- 
   Ted <ted@nowtsfree.freeserve.co.uk>
   http://www.nowtsfree.freeserve.co.uk