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

[Dave]

On Friday 07 September 2007, walt wrote:
> 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.

Ok, I'll put thee straw back now.  I knew there was no point in grasping for 
it ;-)

> 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?

Yes, soft-updates are enabled.

> 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?

It looks like a newly installed default config.  Looks like it was totally 
trashed and Pan built a new, default one.

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

I've done some since I posted.

If posting.xml is missing one of the following can happen.

1  Pan creates a new one on exiting the program.
2  Pan creates a new one if you create and save a profile.
3. If you delete an existing posting.xml while pan is running, both 1 and 2 
above apply.
-- 
Dave