[Pan-users] Re: use a server for articles only, no overview info, how ?

[Duncan]

Scott M. posted on Sun, 18 Apr 2010 16:48:57 +1000 as excerpted:

> If I have multiple servers available, is there a way to direct pan to
> ignore a particular server when scanning for new articles (overviews),
> but allow actual article (body) retrieval?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> If I have multiple servers available, is there a way to direct pan to
> ignore a particular server when scanning for new articles (overviews),
> but allow actual article (body) retrieval?<br><br>Thanks in
> advance,<br><br> _

No personal offense intended, but no need to say everything twice, 
especially with a bunch of extraneous markings in the second time.

Thanks.
No personal offense intended, but no need to say everything twice, 
especially with a bunch of extraneous markings in the second 
time.(&address@hidden
address@hidden

(IOW, there's reasons pan doesn't do HTML.  Security is one of them.  
Plus, if your content is worth reading, it's worth reading without the 
HTML, which leaves HTML for malware purveyors, spammers, and AOLer newbie 
types who know no better.  One would hope you're not in the first two 
groups, leaving the latter, thus the mention, so you can fix it.  Even if 
you can't respect no HTML in your regular mailings, please do respect it 
on the pan list, which many of us actually /view/ with pan, using 
gmane.org's list2news gateway.)

To answer your question in a word, no -- but there's an exception.

The way pan works is to fetch the overviews from all servers, then combine 
them into a single list.  When you go to fetch the actual messages, pan 
knows which servers have the message, and opens up the set number of 
connections to each server (if there's more messages than connections, at 
least), fetching the messages in assigned order.  If the servers are 
prioritized the same, naturally, the server with the least parts will get 
ahead of the others, as pan will try to keep the available connections 
busy and because there's less parts available, pan will be skipping the 
parts that aren't there and fetching what it can, until it fetches all it 
can from that server.  The server with more parts will normally lag 
behind, unless it's enough faster to make up the difference in the number 
of parts, because it'll be picking up the parts that aren't available 
elsewhere.  Meanwhile, servers at backup priority will have overviews 
fetched, but will only fetch bodies if they aren't available from servers 
at normal priority.

The exception would be if you only use pre-downloaded nzb files and never 
fetch overviews (aka headers) at all.  In that case, I believe pan 
directly requests the messages by message-id, without fetching overviews.  
But if you fetch overviews/headers, either automatically upon pan start or 
upon entering a group (based on whether the pan options are set to do so 
or not), or manually, using the fetch headers function, pan will always 
fetch from all servers.

-- 
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