[Scottish] Debian: leafnode 1.9.27 keeps re-fetching all newsgroups from remote news-server(s)

[Colin McKinnon]

David Marsh's list-reading hat wrote:

>I use leafnode (v1.9.27) for fetching news from several remote
>news-servers. Over the past few days, I have noticed that leafnode seems
>to be re-fetching the list of newsgroups from each server on every
>occasion that it runs, with messages such as:
>
> Getting all newsgroups from news.gradwell.net
>  
>
Is it definitely saying 'all' not 'new' (mine - 1.9.19 - says the latter 
every time - and its working OK) ? It may effectively download the full 
list if the clocks on your box and the server are massively out of sync, 
but leafnode should still report 'new'.  And you're not running 
`fetchnews -f` ?  How long does this take? What is your bandwidth? (if I 
run fetchnews -f immediately after a fetchnews, it takes approx. 3 
minutes to get the full group file on a 1Mb ADSL, fortunately I've not 
had to run it from a dial-up modem for some time).

>I presume that it must have reached the refresh period in the
>configuration file, but, obviously, once the newsgroups lists have been
>refreshed, it should not refresh them again for some time!
>  
>
My version doesn't have a config directive for expiring the group list. 
Does fetchnews know it should get a complete listing regularly? The 
NEWGROUPS directive is part of the base protocol and seems to be working 
very well for me. Use the source, Luke?

Even with all the debugging switched on, it doesn't list the details of 
the network transactions. I just had a quick look at 
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0977.txt  - if you skip down to the examples 
(section 4) it's fairly transparent how it operates. Perhaps if you tap 
the wire you might get a clue as to what's going on (e.g. 
http://freshmeat.net/projects/quickanddirtypacketforwarder).

HTH

Colin