[Pan-users] Re: pan servers settings

[Duncan]

Jethro Tull <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Mon, 25
Aug 2008 19:13:24 +0000:

> As i often move between two places and that my newservers are not both
> same i had to set in pan the two servers. But it appears that my pan is
> downloading only from one while the server associated to my account in
> pan (user's preferences) is the other one.
> 
> IOW:
> How to specify Pan which server to use? the users preferences won't
> work.

First, please kill the HTML.  There's a reason pan doesn't do HTML.  
Please respect that at least on the pan lists, even if you can't be 
bothered to do so elsewhere.

Second, you don't mention what version of pan you are using, and it makes 
a difference in this case.   I'll assume a newer version, 0.1xx or above 
(0.133's the latest), not the old 0.14.x or before, since the newer pan 
has been around for a couple years now.  If you're still using older pan, 
post so and we'll try again.

Newer pan checks all configured servers that have a particular group, 
seeing what posts are on all of them.  If you wish, you can set different 
server priorities and pan will try to download all the messages it can 
from the primary servers, using the backup servers only if a message 
isn't on the primary, but it always checks all configured servers to see 
what messages they have.

The workaround, if you don't want it to check all your servers (say you 
can't access some at all part of the time), is to configure multiple 
server sets.

First, configure one set, then close pan and move or copy the servers.xml 
file (by *ix default, ~/.pan2/servers.xml, unless you've set the PAN_HOME 
environmental variable to point it elsewhere, I don't do proprietaryware 
such as MS anything, if you're on it, maybe someone else will help) to 
say servers.xml.1, then open pan back up and configure the other set.  
When that's done, close pan again and move the second set to another 
file, say servers.xml.2, and repeat for any additional server lists you 
want to keep separate.

Then create shell starter scripts, say pan.server1 and pan.server2, that 
copy the approropriate server config to servers.xml before starting pan.
You can then run them from a terminal window or open dialog instead of 
running pan itself.  Optionally, if you use a menu entry or other launch 
method, set it up with an entry for each shellscript launcher, replacing 
the former single pan entry.

If you need help with the shell scripts, just say so, and I can post 
samples you can modify to fit your needs.

-- 
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