Re: checking news problem

On Sun, 31 Aug 2008, John E. Davis wrote:

> There could be any number of reasons for "checking news" to take
> several minutes.  For example, you could have a slow connection and
> many newsgroups, or the server could be overloaded, or there could be
> a network problem between you and the server, ...

The number of groups has not changed but the network, being a Cox
network.....God only knows!

> Are you reading the active file upon startup?  That is, are you
> starting up slrn with the -a option, or do you have
>
>  set read_active 1
>
> in your .slrnrc file?  If not, then try enabling this option.

The active file wasn't set but running "slrn -a" yielded

[holtzm@localhost]~$ slrn -a
slrn pre0.9.9-120/mm/ao
Loading /usr/share/slrn/slang/slrn.sl

Reading startup file /home/holtzm/.slrnrc.***Warning: Unable to find a 
unique fully-qualified host name.
             slrn will not generate any Message-IDs.
             Please note that the "hostname" setting does not affect this;
             see the "slrn reference manual" for details.

Using newsrc file /home/holtzm/.jnewsrc for server news.west.cox.net.
Connecting to host news.west.cox.net ...
Connected to host.  Posting ok.
Checking for new groups ...
Checking news via active file .

followed by a bunch of ignored groups in which there was one run-time 
error shown after the first group, and lastly

slrn fatal error:
An error was encountered during initialization.
Writing /home/holtzm/.jnewsrc ...

So, no joy.

I just found out that the news feed Cox uses recently added almost 10,000
new groups, a great number of these either empty or bogus. Could that be 
connected to this problem?

Thanks for the reply.

-- 
Bob Holtzman
A day without fusion is like, a day without sunshine
If it smells it's chemistry, if it crawls it's biology, if it doesn't
work it's physics


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