Re: [Pan-users] Re: Re: Aggregating servers (was Re: choosing news server)

[Steve Davies]

Hmmm... I can't say I've had a problem yet, but I can forsee one so
I'll throw in my 2p worth...

I am unfortunate enough to be an NTL customer in the UK, and they
offer 2 sets of news servers. A text-only server, and a binaries
server. The latter has a much shorter expiry time, and if queried will
indicate that LOTS more articles have expired.

Because of this, I want to be able to specify which server I use for
which group. Some groups I don't care about, and pan can use whichever
or however many servers it wants, but there are text-only groups where
I want the longest possible expiry. It is also not possible to post to
the binary groups on the text server, so I need to be able to choose a
posting server per-group.

One other case which I used to have, (but don't any more) is where I
had 2 paid-for, volume limited NNTP accounts. The lower volume account
I used for some gruops, and to fill in missing articles, and the
high-volume account most of the time... I did not want to use up my
low-volume quota too quickly in case I "needed" it.

For me the "ideal" solution would be an extension of walt's "suspend
server" idea. This would be to have (in addition to a global
"suspend") a per-group flag to set each server to one of
"preferred","normal" or "suspended" for that group. Then pan would try
to use all "preferred" servers for a given action first, if that
failed, add the "normal" servers to the list and try again.
"suspended" servers will never be used for that group. "preferred"
servers would also be tried first for posting.

Like I say, just my 2p. I have not investigated the current
policies/code, so I hope this idea is not covering existing ground.

Steve