[Pan-users] Re: Odd error messages

[Duncan]

Pete Goudreau <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sat, 02
May 2009 11:28:16 -0500:

> There is something odd happening on occasion which I can't repeat.  I'll
> write a post and hit send only to get an error message that might say,
> "Master's in what?" or "Creative writing!" or just a caret and nothing
> at all. Saving the post as a draft, opening the post to respond to,
> cutting and pasting from the draft, and hitting send again doesn't
> eliminate the problem. Restarting Pan and repeating the above sequence
> works just fine.  A bit strange.

That is strange indeed, as I'm not sure those are from pan!

Could you specify a bit more precisely where these errors are happening, 
dialog box, in the pan log, in a terminal window that you've started pan 
from, or what?  What version of pan, and on what distribution?  What 
desktop environment (KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc) do you run?  What
newsgroup(s) (if it's not too sensitive to want to post the name in 
public)?  If you can point out specific messages, that may be helpful as 
well.  What news server are you using?

Perhaps those messages are localized and you're translating them 
differently than I'd expect?  Or perhaps it's bits of quotes from the 
posts you are replying to (or maybe something else you were working on)?

There are two possibilities that sort of fit, but not quite.  First, if a 
particular message has an "illegal" character, say a non-UTF-8 binary 
character in a post marked as charset UTF-8, I've seen pan fail to quote 
it correctly, but that's when you hit the reply button/shortcut/menu-
item, not after you've finished writing your message and hit send, which 
seems to be your case if I'm reading correctly.

Second, and this sounds strange but your report is a strange report, 
maybe you're seeing some sort of interaction with the select/paste 
mechanism.  That's why I asked if the text might be a fragment of 
something else you had been working on.  Note that the X select/paste 
mechanism may be different than you are used to, given that you said 
you're new to Linux.  You can drag-select, then hit the middle mouse 
button, and it should paste the selected content, possible from a 
different application.  But that doesn't quite match what you are 
describing.  Also, if you have some text selected in the message you're 
replying to, pan will use that as a quote instead of quoting the whole 
thing, but that doesn't sound quite like what you're talking about, 
either.

The other possibility I can think of, as I mentioned, is that you're mis-
translating (or maybe your distribution took some creative liberties with 
the pan it ships) pan's normal error messages.  If you try to top-post 
instead of putting the quote at the top and replying under it, pan will 
warn you, as it will if the message appears to be /all/ quote, no 
original content (as if you hit reply and send accidently), or mostly 
quote, very little new content.  But the warning wording you quote 
doesn't look like any I've ever seen from pan, here, which is why I asked 
about distribution and desktop, thinking maybe it's some odd interaction 
with something else, or strange error message translation.

The other possibility is that it's an error message of some sort from the 
server, which would explain why I don't recognize the pan error as it's 
not from pan.  But usually those are pretty standardized and have an 
associated standard error number... unless of course some wise guy 
decided to "simplify" the server errors in its config.

The only other thing I can think of is that maybe your box is 0wn3d 
(owned, by a cracker) or something, and it's the 133+ (r4(k3r (leet 
cracker) playing games with you.  But that hardly makes sense either, 
mainly because most of those sorts of things are for the money these 
days, and they're far more interested in staying stealthy and using your 
machine as a spam or DDoS zombie than in playing 133+ mind games that'll 
result in detection and loss of access.  But really, it's too early to 
jump to that conclusion yet as there's way more likely stuff to consider 
first.  But I will say I don't recognize those messages at all, making it 
all too strange regardless of what's doing it.

-- 
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