🚀 go-pugleaf

[posted & mailed, since this concerns issues with news collection...]

In article <2000Mar4.032757@marimba>, Ted 
<ted@nowtsfree.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:

>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.

I use Freeserve's news only as a fill-in these days so can't comment on
what happened at that time: was there any announcement about the problem
or any side-effects which might have occurred?

>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.

For the avoidance of doubt: was this Freeserve's news service or had you
been trying elsewhere in the meantime?

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

There are some issues with any news fetching mechanism which relies on
a server's article numbers to identify "new" news.

Currently in uk.comp.os.linux the machine which announced itself as
newsg1.svr.pol.co.uk offers articles between 67685 and 71837.  All the
other machines which currently answer to the name "news.freeserve.net"
appear to be synchronised.  Whether this was the case at the time you
had problems I obviously can't tell.

>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

That's consistent with what I'm finding.

>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

This looks like the article numbers had been reset at some point, or
things were perhaps in a state of flux: the three numbers should be
number of articles, minimum and maximum.  Saying there are 1709 articles
with a maximum of zero points to something strange happening.

>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

That looks reasonably consistent with the article numbers today.

>Jan 24 04:03:22 marimba fetchnews[32722]:
>	skip uk.comp.os.linux (948686599): 607953, 1490065

This *appears* from the leafnode sources to be a symptom of unexpected
results for the group in question.

>Jan 24 04:33:54 marimba fetchnews[14]:
>	uk.comp.os.linux: 473 articles fetched (to 474), 0 killed

And this one seems to suggest that the article counts at Freeserve had
been reset.

>Jan 26 02:10:07 marimba fetchnews[4248]:
>	uk.comp.os.linux: 285 articles fetched (to 65360), 0 killed

but then restored to the previous sequence.

>... and again ...

Yes, it certainly looks like the same sort of thing happened towards the
end of February.  My suspicion is that one of the servers wasn't
synchronised with the rest for some reason.  That it seems to be
happening at an obscure time of day makes me wonder if it's a side
effect of the expire process within INN - Freeserve apparently uses
v1.7.2 so it may be this is a known issue.  I'll check elsewhere.

>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 can't see that it has any way to cope with article counts which get
recycled (short of you editing the .newsrc to say something like
uk.comp.os.linux: 4000-69232 and I'm not sure whether this would work).
However, I think you'll find that the article numbers used within your
system aren't synchronised with those at Freeserve anyway so you
probably aren't missing any articles.  I'll cc this by mail though...

>I presume leafnode skips a news-group because freeserve offers
>it crazy article numbers. Why does this happen?

This remains to be seen, but yes leafnode/fetch makes assumptions that
the article numbers will continue to increment.  The -f option gets
round this so it's not a problem.

>Is it my setup, or freeserve's news-servers?

Taken at face value it's a problem with news.freeserve.net BUT it's
actually unwise to rely on article numbers being unique.  As it's not
the only thing which leafnode uses to identify new/duplicate articles it
probably doesn't matter that much.

>Is there a fix I should know about?

About the only thing I can suggest - since many news fetching mechanisms
use the article counts within a group to a greater or lesser extent - is
to switch to NEWNEWS.  This would, however, mean abandonning leafnode in
favour of a "full size" news server and installing additional things to
do the collection.  It's also just possible that the same sort of
oddness would mess up the operation of NEWNEWS.

I think an examination of INN-1.7.2 is the next stage, unless any
comment from Freeserve is forthcoming.

Dan

-- 
Dan Glover (dan@dangl.demon.co.uk)
Today's Excuse:
  SCSI Chain overterminated