[Pan-users] Re: Newsfeed

[Duncan]

Beartooth <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun, 22 Mar 2009
18:12:34 +0000:

> I was hoping it was something like that. But I was getting scads of red
> marks on the event monitor, all of them from swva dot net -- till I
> deleted that from the list of servers ...

Sounds like you no longer have authorization to use that server -- or at 
least the swva server is of that opinion...

>       Otoh, without swva.net, I don't ever have bburg.general in my
> list of all groups any more. Also, there are several groups in the list
> (such as va.general and rec.hunting) for which I get no headers, even
> when I call for all.

Hmm.  I haven't actually deleted servers enough to know if it deletes 
groups that are only on those servers, or not, so I can't comment on the 
bburg.general disappearance.

The no headers thing... I'm not sure.  It could mean the groups aren't 
active (the server doesn't get an active feed for them) on the servers 
you still have.

There is, however, at least one pan bug that occasionally causes it not 
to see messages on a group.  This bug has to do with messages cross-
posted to groups you've been following for awhile, but other than that 
I've not been able to nail it down at all.  But pan won't fetch messages 
for the group when it hits that bug.  If you start a new pan instance or 
wipe the data on the old one, so pan forgets about the cross-posted 
messages on the groups you've already been following, you can then 
download messages for the new group without a problem, so it's obviously 
a pan-side data bug, not a bug with the server or whatever.

I have a couple groups I'd like to follow but don't, because of this 
bug.  It's very frustrating!  I wish I could say for sure whether you are 
seeing the same bug or whether it's something simple, but I don't know 
enough about the bug /or/ your setup to say --- UNLESS you can say with 
relative certainty that there were no cross-posts between the groups that 
don't seem to be getting messages and others you follow.

In any case, one thing you CAN try (other than deleting your entire set 
of pan data and starting over), is going into the group in question and 
telling it to get ALL headers, not just new ones.  Then ensure you have 
view read messages toggled on, and maybe the new messages will show up as 
already read.  If your problem is the above bug, this won't help.  But 
it's also possible it's just a server mixup, in which case it might.  If 
you are actually getting messages that way but pan thinks they're all 
read, there's a fix for that.  I'll not try to explain it here, but if 
that's what you're seeing, ask and I will in a new reply.

>       I'm thinking I need yet another server besides motzarella; got
> any good ones??

Perhaps the "gold standard" is giganews, if you decide to go paid.  They 
aren't what one would call "cheap", but they put a lot of effort and 
money into ensuring that their news service is the best connected 
possible, and if giganews doesn't have the post, it's relatively safe to 
say few servers beyond the one the original poster used to post the 
message, got it.  Giganews /does/ have some cheaper text-only accounts, 
tho, I believe.  That sounds like what you may be interested in.

>       Iow, if I have to use one I pay for, set that to a lower
> priority, right? Do all feeds charge the same way -- i.e., by bandwidth,
> or by flat rate? Or is it a howling chaos out there?

"Howling chaos" is a pretty apt description.  I don't believe it's quite 
as bad as shopping for a cell phone service, but it's not far from it, 
either.  There's all sorts of plans and prices based on all sorts of 
criteria for all sorts of purposes and usage patterns out there.

The saving grace for you is that you've said you aren't particularly 
interested in binaries.  That means MUCH lower traffic, and consequently, 
that you can knock off the expensive options right off the bat.

Text-only also means that you're likely to be able to find a free server 
that will work well for you if you try hard enough.  Many folks like 
motzarella, which comes well recommended as a free server tho I've never 
tried it.

But, if you just want something that works and don't mind paying a bit, 
for text-only, there's lots of paying options out there too.  You can get 
anything from block accounts, say 25 GB for $15 or $25 or some such, 
which don't expire and should last a very long time (very likely over two 
years for 25 GB on text-only), to the few dollars a month services like 
giganews and others offer.  As I mentioned, giganews has a reputation as 
the gold-standard and for text you can likely get by with their cheapest 
account, if you don't mind paying a bit to just get the best and forget 
about it.  Personally, I've never had a paid account with them, but 
that's because I do binaries too on occasion (tho rarely these days), and 
for binaries, while they are the gold standard, there's cheaper and 
almost as good, which is where I've gone.

> 
>> Since all the gmane groups, for instance, will only be on the gmane
>> server, it'll only grab them from there.  Same, I expect, with the grc
>> groups, etc, from the grc server only.
> 
>       That's fer sartin shore. Steve Gibson is as close to the world
> champion of computer defenses as any one person I know of.

This gets OT, but while I do respect his knowledge, he does have enough 
of the salesman in him to be quite offensive to some.  I do still 
recommend him for MS users, but with the caveat that they take the self-
sales-pitch he offers with a rather large grain of salt.  If people can 
do that, he's a good source of security information.  If they're offended 
by the sales pitch or gullible enough to be taken in by it, for them, 
there are probably better (less offensive and/or more neutral) sources 
for the same info.  But he has a VERY good way of being able to break it 
down into the basics for the people that might not otherwise get or 
understand the vital security info he teaches -- as long as you aren't 
too offended or taken in by the self-sales-pitch at the same time.

>> That's why I've repeated it several different ways now. =:^)
> 
>       Duncan, I can always count on you. I wish you were on more of the
> groups I follow.

Thanks for the kind words. =:^)

-- 
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