[Pan-users] Re: Request: Better handling on failing servers

[ruckles]

On Fri, 13 Oct 2006 13:03:04 +0000, Duncan wrote:

> Mario J. Barchéin Molina <address@hidden>
> posted address@hidden,
> excerpted below, on  Fri, 13 Oct 2006 11:03:56 +0000:
> 
>> I am using Pan for large binary downloads and I have found a very
>> annoying behaviour when working with multiple servers. Let me explain:
>> 
>> Some servers I use offer a free account but with daily download limits,
>> and some others are not 100% time up. When I am downloading stuff from
>> some server and it fails (or just rejects my connection due to daily
>> limit reached) pan shows an error window reporting that was "Unable to
>> connect to server XXXXX" and it automatically goes to disconnected mode
>> for all servers, making the use of alternative servers impossible.
>> 
>> I would like Pan to be "wiser" in this situations and just go and use
>> other servers silently. Maybe it would be a good idea to mark the
>> failing servers internally in some way just to not try to connect to
>> them in some amount of time but never stop the queue when there are
>> alternative servers to download stuff from.
> 
> The one big piece of info missing is what pan version you are using.  I
> checked your headers, to see if you were posting via gmane using pan,
> but it appears you were using them but using their web interface, so
> that still doesn't help (altho it was nice to see Konqueror/KHTML 3.5.5
> in there =8^).
> 
> If you are using old-pan, <0.90, that's a dead branch, as pan has been
> rewritten in C++ and that's what's currently under development.  No
> further development or bug fixes are anticipated.
> 
> If new-pan and one of the last couple weeks worth (0.115 or 0.116),
> please check the bugs and file one if you don't see one on the pre-1.0
> betas, as we want to get it fixed before 1.0 if possible and that's
> coming up pretty fast. (There was a similar report back several versions
> ago, maybe 0.111 or so, that may or may not have been bugged.  I don't
> know the status on it as I fortunately don't have to worry about such
> errors on my regular servers very often. It may or may not have been
> fixed.)
>

I tried to navigate the bug report form, but I'm unsure if it had been
filed.  I can reproduce this error with Pan going offline completely when 
a server fails.  Duncan and I use the same ISP, and they are testing some
beta news servers.  (So perhaps Duncan can confirm this) The connection
limit was recently reduced, so Pan does go offline when one server rejects
a connection (502 error). It would be nice if Pan would go on gracefully
utilizing the remaining connections.  I am using the latest release (0.117)
on an Ubuntu Gnome desktop installed with the .deb file that Steve Davies
put up.

ruckles