Re: [Pan-users] Re: Odd error messages

[Pete Goudreau]

Dug through .pan2 and found the group-preferences.xml file to be
corrupted.  The article cache file had almost 1500 articles in it so
they were deleted.  I found the one the problems occurred with and the
headers are correct including the PGP from the server as far as I can
tell.  Dumped a couple of other files that seemed questionable and
cleaned up some more, restarting pan each time until finally
group-preferences.xml is correct.  Can't find anything untoward in the
files now but I don't know enough to look elsewhere and I'm assuming all
hidden files are shown.

Tnx again,
Pete

On Sat, 2009-05-02 at 20:31 +0000, Duncan wrote:
> 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.
>