Re: [Pan-users] Problems with pan installations

[Duncan]

Dieter Britz posted on Wed, 01 Aug 2018 14:12:33 +0200 as excerpted:

> I have two computers on which I have installed pan, one at work, Ubuntu
> 1604 and one at home, Kubuntu 18.04. After I install pan I then trpy in
> the newsgroups I want to subscribe to, and subscribe.

Trpy?  That's one "trippy" typo!  You lost me.  Here's hoping it's not 
critical to the below...

> One problem is with alt.os.linux.ubuntu. It works on both machines but a
> posting to it from one machine does not appear on the other.

This sounds similar but not identical to a problem I had at one point, 
where I was seeing only my own posts.  Turns out that for some reason I 
had toggled the show only my own posts option under View > Header Pane, 
did what I wanted to do, then forgot about it and quit pan with the 
option still enabled... so naturally when I restarted pan I could update 
headers all I wanted and all I could see was my own posts!

I felt rather stupid after figuring /that/ one out, for sure! [g]

So check the sanity of the settings in view, header pane.

Also, do you have any scores that might be inadvertently affecting things?

And when you update headers, do any errors show up (the icon at the 
bottom right turns red, click it for the log or view it using the event 
log option on the file menu)?

And... I've been assuming you use the same news server at both work and 
home.  If you're using different news servers, perhaps they don't have a 
good peering path between them, or one may even be black-holing the other 
(basically server politics, one server violates rules the other wants to 
enforce, maybe it carries lots of spammers, so the other bans all posts 
from it, or it could be that one is small and the bigger, more connected 
one, wants money to peer...), so you post to one and it never gets to the 
other server.

> Another problem I have here at home is that some ngs work OK,
> but others, which work at work, do not. E.g. dk.kultur.sprog; It shows
> in a pale font, and every time I click on it, I am asked to get the new
> headers, but when I do, I do not get any postings.
> But other ngs work. What is special about these ngs that show pale?

I'm not sure about the color as I long ago customized mine, but typically 
not getting headers at all could be one of two things, both much more 
likely if you're running different servers on each and tried to copy some 
of the per-server data from one pan install to the other, tho they could 
happen for other reasons as well:

1) Perhaps the configured server doesn't carry that group at all?  
(Starting with a clean server config should fix this.)

2) Each server numbers messages in each group sequentially (tho not all 
numbers need appear, some may be assigned numbers then deleted as spam or 
canceled, etc.), and clients including pan typically track what messages 
they've already seen using these sequential numbers.

But different servers will have different number sequences, and 
occasionally a server will reset numbering on its own (due to a database 
change or reset, etc), so you can't use the read-message tracking for one 
server on a different one.  If the new server is ahead of the old one, 
say it has todays posts as 1000-1010 while the old one pan was tracking 
had number 500 as the latest, nothing appears wrong except you might see 
a few messages over again.

But if the new server has lower numbers, then pan thinks it has seen thru 
say 1010, but the new server is only up to say 500, so pan thinks it has 
seen everything in that group already and doesn't download anything.

To fix this, find the corresponding newsrc file (should be in ~/.pan2/ 
but if you have multiple servers configured you'll have several newsrc 
files, one for each server, and you'll need to figure out which one goes 
to which server, probably by using the info in servers.xml), open it in a 
text editor (with pan closed, of course, and as always, making a backup 
of the file first in case you screw things up and need to restore the 
unedited copy is a good idea), then find the line listing the newsgroup 
in question, and delete the numbers beside it.  Save the file, reopen 
pan, and it should now have forgotten which articles it thought it had 
already read for that group and server.


There's also a bug of some sort that I've seen at least on the gmane 
mail2news server, where cross-posts between groups interfere with one 
group getting messages.  I've never traced that one down, unfortunately, 
but I've seen a couple clues in the gmane.discuss group suggesting it 
might actually be specific to gmane and either the list2news service they 
run or the server software they run.  But because I've never traced it 
down I don't know that for sure...  So all I can do is mention it, and 
hope you're not seeing it too (and if I'm lucky, someone else reading 
this will have seen it too, on gmane or elsewhere, and know more about it 
than I do, and if we're /really/ lucky, with note from everyone and some 
devs reading too, maybe we'll get a patch to test as a fix!).

-- 
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