[Pan-users] Re: Two NNTP servers?

[Duncan]

"Dan Stromberg" <address@hidden>
posted address@hidden,
excerpted below, on  Sun, 28 Sep 2008 16:34:06 -0700:

> If I have two NNTP servers, NNTP1 and NNTP2, and there are newsgroups G1
> and G2 that appear on BOTH NNTP1 and NNTP2 - and further, I want to see
> G1 on NTTP1 and G2 on NNTP2 - is there a way of doing this with current
> versions of pan?
> 
> I'm not sure, but it seems like in current versions of pan you list your
> news servers in order of preference - the granularity doesn't seem to
> extend to individual groups. But hopefully I'm wrong about that.  :)

You don't "see" the group on either server.  You "see" the group as a 
list of posts pulled from /both/ servers, combined into a single (local) 
list.  Which server an individual message is pulled from shouldn't matter 
(unless you're tracing headers or something, in which case you want to 
use either a different pan instance, or a different tool better suited to 
diagnostics, like say a manual telnet into the server).

When pan pulls the messages, I do believe it starts with the first server 
in preferences, indeed.  If it's only a single message and it's there, 
that's where it'll come from.  If there's enough articles in the pull so 
it can, it'll start connections to both servers and pull articles as it 
comes to them from each server.  If one server has poor completion and 
only a few of the articles (assuming the same overall speed to each), pan 
will get ahead there, and end up pulling nearly all it can from that 
server, while the server with better completion will take longer as it's 
processing more articles since pan can only get them there, and will fall 
behind the other one, but pull everything it can't get from the low-
completion server off the high completion one.

Now, you can only post a message to one server, so pan must choose, 
there.  For posting, it uses the server configured in your selected 
posting profile.  If you have a posting profile configured for each 
server, you switch which one you post to by switching to the appropriate 
posting profile, just as you'd switch posting profiles to switch sigs, if 
you's setup different sigs in the profiles.

That clear things up? =;^)

-- 
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