[Pan-users] Re: Doc: what's the meanning of the "server rank"?

[Duncan]

"Guilhem Bonnefille"
<address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted
below, on  Mon, 30 Oct 2006 09:09:02 +0100:

> I do not found the meanning of the "Server rank" attribute (primary or
> fallback) of the server properties. What's for? How to configure it? How
> to ellect a server for "primary" and another for "fallback"?

That determines the groups of servers which pan considers equal in terms
of download scheduling.  Everything at the primary level will be scheduled
on a connection available basis.  Only when all primary servers have been
tried and a particular post isn't available to download from any of them,
will pan fallback to the second level to retrieve it there.

The idea is that many folks have ISP bundled or otherwise free or flat
rate servers to set to primary, but have one or more fallback servers that
cost more and are either monthly byte-limited or block accounts, such that
they don't want to use up this expensive and limited resource unless
absolutely necessary.  Server ranking enables pan to manage that
automatically.

BTW, while pan's GUI server dialog only has primary and fallback as
choices, keeping things simple, by editing the server rank entries
directly in the servers.xml config file, you can set as many ranks as
desired.  Suppose you have an ISP and a flat-rate paid server set at
primary rank, since it costs you nothing more to use them no matter how
much you use, and have two additional servers available, one limited to
say five gig download a month billed monthly, the other a 25 gig
unexpiring block account.  In this case, the five gig per month server
should be ranked second, since that limit expires each month if it's not
used, while the block account can be ranked third, since it never expires,
so you want to use up bytes on it only if necessary, thus extending the
use of the block over a longer period.  That'd have to be done by editing
the servers.xml file directly, since the GUI config only has a single
fallback level, and this situation would call for two.

-- 
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