[leafnode-list] configure script suggestion

[Cory C. Albrecht]

Hello,

1.0.1.rel works good for me (just builti it and ran fetchnews) and the 
server prog appears to work fine over IPv4 and IPv6.

I had a suggestion for leafnode WRT how it conencts to the servers. But 
first a little background.

My connection to the 'Net is dial-up :-( via pppd using demand dialing. 
The way pppd appears to work is that an outbound packet triggers the 
dialing, but that packet doesn't always survive long enough to get sent 
out.

Since fetchnews appears to only try the next IP address for a hostname 
rather then retrying to open a connection, this means that for me 
connecting to the first server n the config file fails 75% of the time 
(or more) my primary news server only has one IP address. With the 
primary listed first in config, this meant that out going posts usually 
failed since fetchnews couldn't conenct to it and that I would get no 
new news. :-(

Once, feeling masochistic, I decided to not run fetchnews manually when 
I knew I was connected to the 'Net, and I went a horrible 3 days 
without news, sicne fetchnews was unable to connect to the server. :-(

To get around that I added a free newsserver (allnews.readfreenews.net) 
to the beginning of config and disabled posting to it so that when 
connecting to my real primary news server the PPP conenct to the 'Net 
would be alive and everything would work for it.

But this means that "fetchnews -l" connects to allnews.readfreenews.net 
instead of what is actually my primary news server.

It would be nice if on the config file there were a retries parameter. 
By default this could be 0 and give the current behaviour, but somebody 
with my situation could do "retries = <n>" which would make fetchnews 
try <n> more times, after failing the first time, to connect to the 
same server. 

Also, perhaps the -l option could be extended so that one could do 
"fetchnews -l<n>"  to connect to only a specific server. Just plain "-
l" would be the same as "-l1".

What do you think?
--
Cory C. Albrecht
http://cory.doesntexist.com/
All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
 -- Sean O'Casey