[Pan-users] Re: System crash, Pan reset to defaults

[walt]

On Thu, 06 Sep 2007 21:50:19 +0100, Dave wrote:

> I had a system crash the other day, (USB scanner locked up and
> unplugging it/re-plugging it killed FreeBSD 5.5)
> 
> Pan0.127 was open at the time.  When I restarted everything, Pan had
> resorted to it's default settings for more or less everthing.  Pane
> layout, no groups subscribed (not even the list of groups on the
> servers), profiles gone Bah!
> 
> The news servers were still configured, as is my score file, but every
> other setting is lost, I think.
> 
> Of course, I only found out *after* I restarted Pan so files probably
> got over-written.  I shut Pan down and made a copy of ~/.pan2
> 
> No, I did not have a back up.  TBH, nothing I read/post to usenet is
> valuable enough that I'm bothered that it's gone.  Most of the groups I
> read are from my ISPs news server and of the two they have, I use the
> text-only one which has a retention period measured in months, over a
> year for the ISP internal groups, so that's not an issue.
> 
> What I would like to recover, if possible, is the profiles I set up.
> 
> So, two questions.
> 
> 1)  is it likely there's copies of any of pans config files elsewhere?
> eg pan makes backups of changed files.

Not that I know of.

I just noticed that my posting.xml file is time-stamped yesterday evening 
when I shut pan down, so pan clearly doesn't write to that file when you 
start up, just when you shut down (or edit your profiles).   Seems to me
that your posting.xml should have been intact at the time of the crash
unless you modified your profiles shortly before the crash.

> 2)  is this a situation pan should be able to cope with or is it simply
> that the files were left open and got trashed by fsck/buffers not being
> flushed?

I'm no expert, but my experience has been that soft-updates prevents the 
kind of data loss you describe.  Are you using soft-updates on your file-
system?

BTW, what is in your posting.xml now?  Does it look like the file that
pan2 would create the first time you ever use it, or are there some hints
of your previous profiles that are corrupted?

I'm not sure what pan does if it finds a corrupt posting.xml, but I'll
do some experimenting after I post this.