Re: server list broken

On 3/14/22 9:58 PM, Duncan wrote:
> With that many things going wrong, I'm wondering if your pan config is
> corrupted.  I'd also check your disk/ssd's SMART report, to be sure that
> isn't failing, and run various system diagnostics to be sure you're not
> getting power brown-outs and the like, and maybe a memory diagnostic as
> well, tho if pan's the /only/ thing acting up the system's likely fine,
> but it can't hurt to check.
>
> Assuming nothing appears outright corrupted (no binary gibberish in the
> middle of a text file, etc), I'd ensure I had a backup of my pan settings,
> then either start clean and reconfigure, or if it's less work, start clean
> and restore the config from backup a file or a few at a time.  Luckily
> most of pan's config is text-based, with the files named such that it's
> fairly easy to see what each one does.  (An exception is the newsrc files
> which track groups on each server along with the per-server per-group
> read-message sequence numbers.  They're identified with a number and
> newsrc, with the mapping of which one goes to which server in the
> servers.xml file.)
>
> What I'd probably do here is restore the general settings files such as
> preferences.xml and the hotkeys files (if you've customized hotkeys), and
> ensure that they seem to be fine before actually starting on the server
> config, which I'd probably redo from scratch.  The subscribed groups could
> go either way.  Then one by one I'd move the old newsrc files in place,
> manually editing the servers.xml file to map them as appropriate, so as
> not to lose the read-message tracking.  Tho the newsrc files could well be
> part of the problem -- perhaps the mapping between server and its newsrc
> file, as stored in servers.xml, got screwed up.  So you may need to dump
> the newsrc files and start over with that bit of the config, downloading
> the list of groups from each server again to initialize new newsrc files,
> and starting over with marking which messages you've already read.
>
> Your posting.xml file, which tracks the posting profile settings, could
> also be messed up, so you might need to rebuild your posting profiles from
> scratch.
Probably my ~/.pan2 is corrupted: I noticed a .XML was missing a server 
but still had one I'd deleted (and no longer in Edit -> Edit News Servers.)

Normally starting graphical user interface (GUI) notifies smartd 
problems, so lately status was okay, and I ran smartcl short tests on 
SSD/M2/NVME (/) & HDD (/home: ) SSD said passed but HDD ended without 
such further specific status output.  It's possibly wearing out, though 
unlikely because not-very-old WD/HGST (I even have almost-20-year-old 
WDs passing SMART) but I can't afford to replace yet. Should I do long 
test?  I'm unsure can when HDD being used...

I don't think power brown-outs affect my uninterruptible power supply 
(UPS) w/long battery time.

I doubt it's RAM: Pan is sole program I'm having major problems with.

Whether HDD or not, I guess I'll have to start over.  However, I 
subscribed to approaching 1,000 newsgroups (well, 800 to 900+) so need 
to extract from .newsrc* to get actual user-friendly .newsrc* some older 
newsreaders and Mozilla (Thunderbird, Seamonkey) have (only subscribed 
groups; full Usenet/etc. list in other file.)  At least older 
command-line ones could show only subscribed ones to copy & paste from 
terminal.  Seems .newsrc has problems but I'm not going to edit almost 
1,000 XML entries.  If I can't extract actually-subscribed groups, I'm 
not going to spend days/weeks paging tens/hundreds thousands lines 
newsgroups to see which have articles, so may be unable to use NNTP 
anymore.  If I could only get a user-friendly .newsrc, having to 
resubscribe almost 1,000 newsgroups is several-days-project but 
doable/worthwhile to recreate functional .newsrc and be able to post again.


_______________________________________________
Pan-users mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users