Re: [Pan-users] tip: getting pan to run off another location other than /home

[Duncan]

Pedro posted on Sat, 01 Apr 2017 14:17:25 +1100 as excerpted:

> for linux users, particularly as the headers are getting into the
> gigabytes for servers with long retentions..
> 
> pan by default installs to /home/<username>/.pan2
> 
> but with this symlink  command you can make any other location be that
> .pan2

A symlink is one method.

But pan actually checks the PAN_HOME environmental variable and uses the 
directory it points to as its data dir, with ~/.pan2 only being the 
reasonable default if $PAN_HOME wasn't set (tho it won't be in most 
systems).

That actually makes it possible to have multiple pan instances, as I do 
here, by setting up wrapper scripts that set and export $PAN_HOME before 
starting pan itself.

Here, I use that with wrapper scripts named pan.bin, pan.text, and 
pan.test, to setup different instances for my text and binary groups, and 
yet another instance for testing, that I can wipe the cache and group/
message tracking from after checking a post someone mentions on-list as 
causing trouble for them, for instance, without having to worry about 
losing my regular groups.  My pan.text instance is set to never expire, 
so I have a more or less permanent archive of my text groups, including 
my ISP's newsgroups from years ago, before they killed the server, and 
messages from this list via gmane going back to 2002.  Of course I 
wouldn't want to do that with binaries...

But that's just the division I've chosen to use.  If you want to setup 
separate instances for say your TV/movie groups vs. your mp3/music groups 
vs. your kids' kid-safe groups vs. your pron groups, or on the text side, 
your MS groups vs. your FLOSS groups vs. your non-computer-related 
groups, go right ahead. =:^)


FWIW, that's just one of several lessor known "power user" tricks 
available with pan.  Perhaps the other reasonably common one is editing 
the servers.xml file directly to set > 4 connections per server, 
something that many paid NSP accounts allow, but that is not allowed in 
the pan GUI due to its observance of GNKSA.

Another very common one is direct editing of the SCORE file, for 
optimization and/or to accomplish scoring in ways the rather simplified 
GUI scoring interface doesn't allow.

Other probably less common ones are editing the servers.xml file and 
renaming your newsrc files accordingly, to match the server names or 
whatever, instead of being the rather generic newsrc-1, newsrc-2, etc, 
and editing expiration to an arbitrary number of days, instead of the 
rather limited number of choices available in the GUI.  And of course 
renaming the newsrc files points to direct-editing them as well.

Another is editing global accels via accels.txt.

There's probably others I'm not remembering ATM.


Meanwhile, back to symlinks, another similar system-level method is 
mounts and/or bind-mounts.  With PAN_HOME it's not so necessary for pan, 
but the same techniques can be used for other, rather less flexible, 
applications.  What's nice about bind-mounts is that they allow you to 
set mount options such as readonly and noexec, at the directory or even 
down to the individual file level if that's what's bind-mounted, that may 
not be easy to enforce otherwise.  Of course they /do/ require the 
ability to mount in the first place, something that's normally reserved 
for superuser/root.

-- 
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