Re: Bug#323449: tin hanged with: Can't retrieve active

On Tue, Aug 16, 2005 at 10:42:11PM +0200, Miernik wrote:
> Package: tin
> Version: 1:1.7.10+20050815-1
> Severity: normal
> 
> I am running tin as rtin with a local newsserver (noffle), and today
> rtin was running as usual, I have 51 groups in my .newsrc, and I was
> away from the computer. When I came back, I see rtin hanged, no reaction
> to any keys, and displaing in the last line of the screen:
> 
> Can't retrieve active

sounds like noffle died or closed the link without a propper feedback to the
client - as the client can not recognize if the server has closed the
connection (if it doesn't give any feedback) till some kind of timeout will
occur it sits there and wait's for data (e.g. the active file). this is a
server error, not a client one, but the client could have a timeout to
detect it (tin doesn't have such a timout anymore, it was removed during
some rewrite of the (network)reading code a few years ago).

> Looks like it's stuck on connection to local newsserver. But it is like
> that since half an hour at least, it should time out or something. There

as mentioned above it's the servers fault if it shut's down the connection
without telling the client,.but the client should have some kind of
timeout to catch the (rare) case that the server fails to tell the client
that it had closed the connection. tin once had such a fature but it got
lost dring the rewrite of read.c. if anyone is willing to fix this look for
NNTP_READ_TIMEOUT.

news.arcor.de (dumb cluster setup) has the 'same' prolem, long ideling
clients are timed out on the server side but the server fails to tell this
the client ...

> is not much I can do besides killing it.

ps xauww | awk '/[t]in/{print $2}' | kill -1

sould be 'safe' (newsrc should be written out propper).

> Finally I did:
> 
> jaworz:~$ sudo killall noffle
> jaworz:~$ sudo killall noffle
> jaworz:~$ sudo killall -9 noffle
> jaworz:~$ sudo killall -9 noffle
> noffle: no process killed
> jaworz:~$
> 
> And then rtin did quit too.

as it noticed that the connection was closed when the server finally died

urs
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