[Pan-users] Re: Full Group List Keeps Vanishing

[Duncan]

Emily Jackson posted <address@hidden>,
excerpted below,  on Sat, 29 Nov 2003 06:58:59 -0600:

> I am using pan 0.14.2 with Mac OS X 10.3.1 and Apple's version of X11,
> and from time to time the full newsgroup list appears to vanish; it
> doesn't appear when I select "All Groups" from the popup menu, and I only
> see my subscribed groups. Quitting and restarting pan doesn't help, and
> the only way to get the full newsgroup list back is to fetch the complete
> newsgroup list from the news server. Since the news server in question
> (Giganews) carries over 60,000 newsgroups, this can take a while on a
> dialup connection. Is there anything I can do to fix this?

Dialup.. ouch!  3Mbps down, 256kbps up, cable connection here, but it'd
still be frustrating to have that happening, especially if you are on an
account where that traffic is taken out of your quota.

Assuming paths on OSX are similar to those on Linux, pan's config and data
files will be under ~/.pan/data.  The files in question are
<servername>_unsub.dat and .idx, and the related *.bak files.  You may be
able to copy the *.bak files to the non-bak name, and save yourself a d/l,
next time.  File system corruption due to a PAN or system crash, is the
probably cause of losing them, tho it's possible there's a PAN bug to
blame as well.

If you are experiencing problems regularly, as you seem to be, and
especially since you are on dialup and with their large group list, it may
be wise to back up the files another step, by hand.   The safest of course
would be to back up the entire .pan dir, altho that will back up the
message cache as well, which you may or may not want, depending on the
space you have available, your cache size, and how often you plan on doing
it.  (If you back it up seldom enough that the cache will be expired
anyway, no sense in backing it up.)    The messages subdir contains both
the cache and your pan.sent and pan.sendlater folders, so you can avoid
copying both the cache and the pan.* folders, or just the cache, if
desired, by choosing what you copy when you back up.

Alternatively, you may wish to try doing it from pan itself, by using the
news.rc file import/export functions.  I've never used a reader that used
these standard, and haven't experimented with pan's import/export
functions, so I don't know what all is saved in the newsrcs, whether it
saves the whole list or just subscribed groups, but if you don't like
messing around with the file system directly, you could experiment with
that functionality and see if it helps.  Even setting pan up to
automatically import/export may be all you need, avoiding the hassle of
manually backing up the files entirely.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin