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

[David Marsh's list-reading hat]

On Wed, 08 Jan 2003 09:57:28 +0000
Colin McKinnon <colin@wew.co.uk> wrote:

> 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) ? 

Yep, that line above is directly posted from output if I run leafnode
manually. I first suspected something was amiss when normal automatic
leafnode runs on dialup seemed to be taking 20+ mins rather than 5 - 10.

> And you're not running `fetchnews -f` ?

Nope.

> How long does this take? 

Over 20 mins (I use 3 upstream servers)

> What is your bandwidth? 

Humble 56k modem and variable quality Claranet connection.


> >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?

## timeout_active determines how many days fetch will wait before
re-reading## the whole active file. The default is 90 days.
# timeout_active = 365
timeout_active = 700

(I recently bumped up to 700 in an attempt to stop it, no joy)

> The NEWGROUPS directive is part of the base protocol and seems to be
> working very well for me. Use the source, Luke?

Sorry, these days I'm just a user, really..
I wouldn't know where to start (don't think I even have the source).


> 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).

Hmm, thanks for the tip. Don't know if I would have sufficient Clue to
look into it, though..  :-(


David.

-- 
David Marsh, <email in header is valid>  | http://web.viewport.co.uk/