[Pan-users] Re: Old Pan: Cannot see newsgroup 'read' items before March 11

[Duncan]

Maurice <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun, 17 Aug
2008 18:05:43 +0100:

> On Sunday 17 August 2008 17:22:22 Duncan wrote:
> 
>> it won't check
>> backup servers until it has failed to find a message on the main
>> servers), and AFAIK there's no in-pan way of disabling a server, only
>> to set multiple levels of backup.
> 
>   I don't understand the 'backup' facility you mention.
> 
>   Is it a way of saying 'If you can't get a response from server X then
>   try server Y', for instance?
>

Yes, no, sort of. =8^)

As with a number of settings in new-pan, the GUI has this as a simplified 
setting, but should you be advanced enough to deal with more, it's 
exposed in the config file (servers.xml in this case) so you can do so.

In the GUI it's Server Rank, with two settings, primary and fallback.  In 
servers.xml, the setting is a number, 1-x, where 1 is primary, 2 is 
fallback, and there can be fallbacks to the fallbacks as ranks 3-x as 
well if desired.

When downloading the posts themselves (aka the bodies), if a group exists 
on servers at multiple ranks, it will try all the ones on one rank before 
trying those on another rank.  Thus, it won't use post bandwidth on the 
fallback servers if the post exists on the primary.

However, from reports (I've never personally tried the fallback 
functionality here) regardless of the rank, pan still tries an initial 
connection and downloads overviews/headers from all servers, thus 
allowing it to figure out what's on which server and in the case of 
multiple ranks, whether it has to fallback because it's not on the 
earlier ranked servers.

Thus, fallback servers ARE contacted for headers/overviews even if they 
aren't used for actual post download, and there's no direct way to turn 
that off.

As I mentioned, however, that can be worked around by using a starter 
script similar to what I do, only where I set PAN_HOME in the script so 
it points pan at the appropriate settings and starts that instance (with 
scripts named pan.bin, pan.test, and pan.text, for my three instances), 
you'd have yours copy either (say) primary-servers.xml or backup-
servers.xml to servers.xml, so pan started the appropriate one.  If 
you're not up on your shell scripting, let me know and I can post sample 
scripts for you.  Here, I have an entry for two of the three scripts in 
my Kmenu as well, with a khotkeys shortcut to pan.text and pan.bin (if I 
want to test something, I start that one from the open dialog), but of 
course how you start it after you setup the scriptlets is up to you and 
depends to a large degree on your desktop environment of choice.

-- 
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