On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 5:08 AM, Duncan
<address@hidden> wrote:
[The below comes across a bit strong. Please understand it's nothing
personal.]
No, I'm sorry about the HTML. Hopefully I've turned it off. Gmail uses kind of odd terminology. I use this email exclusively for about three list serves -- so it shouldn't have HTML.
<SNIP>
First, how many connections do you have pan configured to use, and how
many do your servers allow? While you often want the four per server pan
allows in the GUI if you're doing binaries, for text groups only, as with
motzarella, two connections (or even one) should be fine. I've never
used motzarella myself, but I just checked and the web site says four
connections allowed, so that may be what you are using. Setting pan to
one or two might allow you to grab another allowed connection when it
times out -- provided pan knows it's timed out. (Are you getting an error
in pan's error log, or not? If so, pan knows it's timed out, otherwise,
it doesn't, and it's obviously trying to use a stale connection that's
timed out elsewhere.)
As far as I know, I'm only using one connection at a time. I use two news groups, both text only. I'll have to check the error log (didn't even know to look there). Where would I look? And, it looks like I've already got Pan set to four connections -- I think that was the default.
Second, it'll be a bit of a chore to do it manually, but you can probably
use pan's offline feature to kill existing connections -- PROVIDED you do
it before whatever times them out. IOW, if you wait until after pan's
hanging, taking it offline's likely to hang as well due to the fact that
the TCP close connection packets will get as hung as the attempt to send
does, so you have to do it as soon as you stop actively using the
connection. I think there's a hotkey to toggle on/offline that should
make it easier. (I've long since made my own hotkey assignments here,
and nearly equally long since forgot what the defaults were for most
things, but IIRC it was L or maybe O.) You should then be able to wait
until you have a couple things ready to go if desired, and toggle it
online to do them, then back off. Doing it that way should close the
connection properly, allowing a new one to open properly when you need it.
This sounds promising. I don't think it would be that big of a deal to type "L" when I'm about to write a longer response, then type "L" when I'm ready to post. I didn't even think about that. Thanks.
Meanwhile, I have an educated guess at what the problem is. Are you
direct-connecting to your modem, or are you using a router (noting that
some modems have a built-in router)? The problem sounds to me very much
like a mis-configured NAPT that has WAY too short a timeout on inactive
TCP connections. That's very typical of some cheap crap-quality routers,
tho it's technically possible (but far less likely) to do it with a
firewall on a direct-connected computer.
I'm using a Linksys router, and my computer is using a D-LINK wireless Ethernet adapter. This might be an issue, but it doesn't seem to give me trouble with other news readers.
FWIW, such connection timeouts are often a full 24 hours, tho in low-
resource many-dead-connections conditions something like an hour or two
(or really, anything longer than the server timeout, typically 15 minutes
as I mentioned up top) may be better, using less resources while long
enough to work. If you're correct in your time estimates and I'm correct
in my guess, your TCP idle connection timeout may be five minutes or
less, which, as you discovered, can be quite problematic. =:^(
Thus, unless it's crap-quality routing/NAPT at your ISP (and if you're
behind NAPT at the ISP, they really /are/ crap!), I'd say odds strongly
favor you running a presently mis-configured router. Depending on what
brand, model, and most importantly firmware it is, there's some chance
the TCP timeout is configurable, and that'll fix it. Alternatively,
there may be a newer firmware available that will fix it. Another
alternative, provided it's a compatible router, would be upgrading to a
community based firmware such as OpenWRT, DD-WRT, Tomato, etc, tho that's
a significantly bigger step as you're often voiding the warranty doing
something like that.
I'll look more into this. The Linksys router is running its newest available firmware. I don't see a TCP timeout setting.
So let us know what sort of router you have, if any, and what firmware,
and /possibly/ someone here can help. You can also try the appropriate
equipment forums at broadbandreports.com (aka dslreports.com). They're
actually more likely to be of help with this sort of thing, as it's
really not a pan problem at that point, and some of those guys deal with
fixing that sort of problem on their respective hardware all the time.