[Pan-users] Re: Feature Request: Posting Only / Disabled Servers

[Duncan]

"Jack Cuyler"
<address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun, 27 Aug 2006 04:39:41
+0000:

> Since many servers limit the total bytes transferred in a given month,
> it would be nice if Pan would allow a server to be marked as "disabled".
>  That way, when the monthly limit is getting close, the user could
> manually stop Pan from using that server without having to delete the
> server altogether.

This /would/ be a nice feature, but it's very unlikely to make it for 1.0,
and in the mean time, there's a couple possible manual workarounds you can
try.

First backup the pan dir (~/.pan2/ by default, set by $PAN_HOME) (you
don't have to backup the article cache) so you don't curse me if these
suggestions screw something up. =8^).

Now, there's a servers.xml file that contains the config for each server.
There are two possible ways to modify it that could accomplish what you
want.  The one has less chance of screwing the rest of the config but
might not work, the second should work but might cause pan to delete the
"inactive" config files, thus the backup suggestion above.

1) You can't set it from the GUI, but the first thing to try is setting
the connections for the servers you wish to disable to zero.  Pan may
disable them in that case -- or it may decide that's invalid and force one
connection, or crash or something.

(Note that it's also possible to set other things manually that aren't
possible from the GUI.  For instance, GNKSA says no more than four
connections per server, and Charles rightly takes great pride in having
pan GNKSA compliant, so it's not possible to set more from the GUI.
However, if your server allows more, it /is/ possible to set more, as many
as you want, by directly editing this file.  Another file-edit-only
possibility is setting expiration to something odd like six weeks.  Yet
another, in preferences.xml, is setting the cache size to something larger
than 10MB.  I have my binary pan instance (I used $PAN_HOME to set up
separate binary and text instances) article cache symlinked to a dedicated
12 gig partition, so set the cache size accordingly.  This works better
for my style of download to cache first, /then/ go thru and save or
discard, rather than saving to file directly.)

2) If setting zero connections doesn't work, try deleting the entire
record for the server you wish to disable, taking care to preserve the xml
structure, of course.  Pan won't try to connect to a server it doesn't
know about, tho as I said, test with a backup the first time, since it
might delete the rest of the info (newsrc file and the like) for that
server as well.

In both cases, you can keep two (or more) copies of the servers.xml file,
one with all servers enabled, one with appropriate servers disabled, and
simply switch between them as necessary.  Of course, do the switching with
pan closed.

> Likewise, some servers offer "unlimited uploads" while still metering
> downloads.  It would be nice if Pan would allow the user to mark that
> server as "posting only", where Pan would not grab new headers and
> articles from that server but still allow posting.

This looks reasonable as well.

One thing already possible is setting priorities.  Note that the
priorities are for downloading, while posting is controlled by the posting
profiles selected for individual groups.  If you set your posting servers
to lower priority (higher number), while headers will still be downloaded
(I think), it'll only download posts from there if they don't appear on
the other servers, thus saving your metered bandwidth.

Actually, this is another setting that editing the config file directly
gives you more control over than the GUI.  While the GUI has only primary
and secondary, you can set as many "rank" levels as you wish by directly
editing the entries in servers.xml.

That leads one to yet another possibility.  I have /no/ idea whether this
will work or not, but logically, setting a zero rank /should/ cause the
server to disable it entirely for downloads.  Because uploads are
controlled by the separate mechanism of the posting profile set in group
preferences, if a zero rank /does/ disable downloading as it logically
should, you just got your feature!

Again, backup the config dir in case the unexpected setting causes pan to
do something bad like blow up its config, and test it.  If it works, =8^).
I'm off to make a suggestion on the bug accordingly.

-- 
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