[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:

>>>      
>>>
>>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.
>
>  
>
Right enough. I should probably RTFM before shooting my mouth off.

>>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).
>
By way of amends (and because its another _really_ quiet day here.....
(from fetchnews.c)
if ( active && !forceactive && ( stat( s, &st ) == 0 ) ) {
    ----it will get NEWGROUPS
else
    ----it will get all groups

It uses the mtime on 'active.read' as the time of the last full update - 
you might want to check the permissions and timestamp on this (on my box 
its in /var/spool/news, and is 0 bytes). If it's older than 
timeout_active then 'forceactive' is set before the above bit of code. 
It is this file which is checked by the 'stat' statement in the above so 
if it is not found then it will get all groups too (stat() will return 
0). The first term in the clause ('active') above is a pointer to the 
first element in an array of newsgroup structures. This is loaded from 
the file ".../leaf.node/groupinfo". Again, try checking that it exists 
and the permissions are OK. It is a simple ascii list of newsgroups so 
you might want to take a peak and check that it looks OK.

HTH

Colin