🚀 go-pugleaf

Dan Glover <dan@dangl.demon.co.uk> writes:
> <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?

There was an announcement about expansion of email storage capacity on
Fri 21st Jan. I couldn't reach their mail servers early am Jan 24th either.
I guess they were having problems that night.

> >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?

No, just Freeserve.

> [snip]
>
> >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.

A look at the source for leafnode, shows I misunderstood fetchnews's
'skip' messages. They refer to a group being unread for too long.
I use a script to touch the groups I want before running fetchnews.
This may have altered the st_ctime values of files in leafnode's
interesting.groups directory which may have contributed to my problems.

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