[Pan-users] Re: Pan keeps "forgetting" server

[Duncan]

walt <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:39:31
+0000:

> On Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:48:12 -0700, Joe Zeff wrote:
> 
>> Four times now, I've opened Pan and had it ask me for a server because
>> it's deleted the server info from the config file.  The last time, I
>> changed the permissions on the file to Read Only, hoping this would put
>> a stop to it, but no.  It simply changed the permissions back to
>> read/write and deleted the info again.
>> 
>> This is a Major Inconvenience to me.  Every time I have to get the list
>> of groups again, subscribe to the two I want again, and mark read the
>> hundreds of old posts.  AGAIN.  I'd really like to put a permanent stop
>> to this.  Has anybody else run across this stupid behavior?
> 
> There is something wrong with your setup, and the usual is a corrupted
> config file somewhere in ~/.pan2 (BTW, which version of pan?).
> 
> I would try renaming ~/.pan2 to move it out of the way and then let pan
> start fresh with a new config directory.  If you have lots of valuable
> settings in your present .pan2 directory you can try copying the old
> files one at a time to your new .pan2 directory until you hit the
> corrupt one.  Then maybe you can deduce what's corrupted and let us
> know.

This is my recommendation as well.  I've done similar with dozens of 
different apps over the years.

Reinforcing the above, definitely, what version of pan are you using?  
Modern (0.132 being the latest, 0.133 should be out soon, I hope) pan 
keeps the server information in a separate file, servers.xml, in the (by 
default) ~/.pan2 dir.  Your post implies that may not be the case with 
what you are using, which would make it an old version, 0.14.x, no longer 
officially supported by Charles, tho we try to help (I still have it 
installed so I can reference it when necessary).  Note that if you are 
using an older version and choose to upgrade, some things work 
differently and a couple not at all in the new version.  You can of 
course post questions if necessary.

Other than that, how long has it been since you've done a proper fsck?  
Any time you start getting corrupt files and the like it's time to think 
about that, as it could be something in the filesystem you want to catch 
before it spreads and starts damaging other things.  It's also possible 
it could be bad hardware, either the disk going bad or memory/power/cpu 
corrupting data that ultimately gets stored on it, tho one hopes not and 
you probably don't need to worry about that unless it's happening 
elsewhere as well.

-- 
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