Re: Marked for Download Problem

* Jim Hague <[email protected]>, 2004-03-31 23:07 +0200:
> On 31-Mar-2004 Andre Berger wrote:
> > I see a strange behavior in noffle 1.1.5: articles Marked for
> > Download are never fetched. In the first place, I don't understand
> > why there are such articles anyway.
> 
> Noffle fetches from upstream in basically two steps. First it issues an XOVER
> to get the overview info for the unread articles upstream. The filters run on
> the overview information. Articles are created at that point as 'Marked for
> download', assuming they survived filtering, and entered in the list of
> articles to be requested from upstream.
> 
> The next step is to take articles to be requested in turn and download their
> bodies.
> 
> If anything goes wrong with the second step, articles will be left as 'marked
> for download'. I see this quite often from my upstream; the upstream is usually
> overloaded and will have overviews available before bodies. The article bodies
> appear on subsequent fetches. If, however, your newsreader caches articles, you
> won't see the body when it arrives, as the newsreader will just show the 'body'
> it got before, the one saying 'Marked for download'. Which newsreader are you
> using?
> 
> > I'm on modem dialup, and my
> > /etc/ppp/ip-up contains "noffle -n && noffle -f", my /etc/ppp/ip-down
> > "noffle -o".
> 
> Ah. You're using online mode. That shouldn't make any difference, but I don't
> use it myself so I can't be sure.
> 
> If you run noffle -f from the command line, it should give you some details on
> what it downloads. The same details will be recorded in the syslog 'news' as
> well. Check them over and see if you get many 'Retrieving failed' messages.

Took me a while to figure out what went wrong: It was a timing
problem. My news user agent sometimes fetched the articles between
step one and step two, then listed them as fetched and subsequently
ignored the bodies that arrived later. I made sure it won't run while
a noffle fetch is in progress, and everything is OK now. Also, I
switched to offline mode just in case. 

Thanks!

-Andre


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