[Pan-users] Re: Pan just reset itself

[Duncan]

Joe Zeff posted on Fri, 20 Aug 2010 08:49:37 -0700 as excerpted:

> I'm running Pan on Fedora 13, completely up-to-date.  this morning, I
> opened up Pan to read the three text groups I follow.  First, it
> downloaded the headers.  Then, it asked me to download today's headers
> for each group.  When I entered each group, it "corrected" the unread
> messages to the correct number and read them.  I don't know how, but
> there were two copies of it open, although only one had shown up on the
> task bar.  After closing the second one, I reopened the first to make
> sure all was OK, as I know that having two open from the same newsrc
> sometimes causes trouble.
> 
> Well, it caused more trouble than I'd expected: now, it's acting as
> though there's no server configured and wants me to set one up.
> Everything seems to be OK in the directory, it just doesn't recognize
> the server.  If all else fails, I have this set up on my laptop for when
> I'm away from home, so I can ftp the appropriate server file across, but
> it'd be nice if I didn't need to.  Suggestions?

I wonder...

Scenario:  Depending on the desktop environment and/or session and/or 
window manager you run, it can be that it remembers the apps you had open, 
either from a specific remembered session, or from the last session, and 
reopens them.  That is in fact how I normally run pan, here -- I always 
have it open (on its own dedicated desktop) with x/kde, so when I close 
kde, which I have set to remember and restore the last session, it sees 
pan and remembers it, so it restores it the next time I run x/kde again.

But, depending on how much pan data you have stored, it can take some time 
to open and build its thread tree -- mine takes about a minute, with cold 
disk cache, even with four drives in RAID-1 and the kernel doing 
reasonably efficient parallel seek scheduling on all four spindles, as I 
have posts going back years in some groups.  (I have a several gig cache 
on my text instance, and don't expire posts.  It'd probably take twice 
that or more on a single spindle.)

It could be that whatever you run restored pan for similar reasons, but 
due either to the cold-cache loading or the fact that it was starting on a 
different desktop, you didn't realize it, and started a second pan running 
at the same time.  This one would have come up sooner as the files would 
already be in disk cache.

Again, depending on your desktop environment, some taskbars "group" 
similar apps, so only one "pan" icon might have shown up in the taskbar.

But that doesn't explain the missing servers.

What about this?  As above, but you hadn't synced from home yet when the 
first pan started.  So then you synced and started a second instance, 
which saw the info you'd just synced.  You ran it and everything worked.  
You unloaded it, saw the first instance, and got worried.  After shutting 
it down, you restarted pan, and because the last one shut down didn't know 
about the sync, it overwrote the files you'd just synced, thus losing the 
work you'd just done.

There's still a few unanswereds tho, especially if your session manager 
and taskbar don't normally work as I explained above.

Another possibility, tho with even more unexplaineds, would be that 
somehow, the one instance either started up as a different user or with 
PAN_HOME set, so pointed at an entirely different location, and that it's 
trying to use that, now.  That'd probably be totally unconfigured, so it'd 
explain pan forgetting everything even tho the files seem fine, but the 
unexplained bit is what caused the change of the PAN_HOME var or the run 
as a different user.

Yet another possibility is that you have some sort of filesystem 
corruption.  This one gets ugly but may not have as many unexplaineds.

At this point, just to be sure where I was, I'd do a full reboot and fsck 
of the partition in question.  If that shows up clear, I'd also run if you 
have the tools installed, a SMART status check on the disks.  I'm not sure 
I'd install it if in doubt, as any installations could further screw up a 
disk on its last legs, if that's what you have, but if you have it 
available (I always make it a point to have smartmon-tools installed), I'd 
run it.  If the fsck shows errors and they're corrected, I'd run it 
again.  If it continues to show additional errors each time, GET THE DATA 
YOU WANT OFF THAT DISK ASAP!!  Similarly if the smart check says it's 
going bye-bye, of course.

Back to assuming a healthy disk, I don't know, unless you /did/ do the 
sync with one pan instance already running, in which case, yes, you'll 
likely have to sync again, and will lose part or all of the work you did 
in the interval.

You can run pan using strace -eopen to see what files it's accessing, of 
course, and thus verify for sure where it's pointed at, but be aware that 
you'll need to grep the output to get it down to a manageable size, as 
particularly X based apps do an amazingly prodigious amount of attempted 
file opens, libraries, icons, fonts, various toolkit theme (gtk in this 
case) config files... many of them failing as it looks several places for 
the same file, based on where the various distributions put them.  A start 
might be grepping for the path of your home dir, thus eliminating all the 
"system" file open activity from the report in one fell swoop. (There's a 
phrase to google, "one fell swoop".  Interesting origins, but perhaps as 
my dad is an avid bird watcher, I /did/ have the correct imagery in mind, 
that of a bird of prey swooping down and grabbing a poor animal before it 
had any inkling of what was happening.)  And of course, the environment of 
the terminal window from which you run strace might be somewhat different 
than the environment with which pan is launched from a menu entry or with 
the session, 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