[Pan-users] Re: download stops by itself

[Duncan]

joe smith <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below,
on  Fri, 27 Oct 2006 18:59:34 -0700:

> I start pan, add some tasks to the queue and walk away, after a while
> (could be an hour or a week) I might find pan open and running but not
> doing anything (i.e. not downloading), the app is not frozen as I can work
> within it. in the older version nothing other than quitting and restarting
> the app seemed to work.
> 
> I've encountered the same problem with the latest version (on a newer
> version of the OS) but on this one I was able to just hit "restart tasks"
> and pan started downloading again.
> 
> I would like to know:
> a. is this a known bug or am I the only one to see it ? b. I would like to
> set up some mechanism to do a soft reset to the app every hour or so
> (maybe through cron). it there any signal I can send the app or command
> line switch to establish the restart ??

It's a known bug, yes.  Basically what's happening is that when a single
connection goes bad, pan seems to think the internet broke altogether and
stops all the others as well.  It then doesn't seem to restart them.  As
you said, with old-pan, one often had to stop and restart pan to get it to
work.  At least new-pan is allowing restart.

I don't know a scriptable way to take advantage of that, however.  Does
Linux have any way to load keystrokes into an app's queue from another
app?  There were tools that allowed that on MSWormOS, but I've never seen
anything like it on Linux, altho it isn't so needed as stuff tends to be
more scriptable in general.

One thing you /could/ do...  Have something check either your bandwidth
usage or the pan-cache timestamp, and if it's older than five minutes or
some such (maybe 15 or 20 on dialup) or if bandwidth is lower than X,
issue killall pan (which will sigterm it, giving it a chance to save its
work), then restart pan.  It should resume the download where it left off
(you'll probably want to uncheck the "Get new headers in subscribed groups
at startup" option, so that doesn't interfere with the continuing download).

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman