[leafnode-list] Can't get leafnode to work with news servers that work with clients.

[Adam Funk]

On a Debian testing system I recently installed the leafnode
1.11.2.rel-1 package.  I have been trying to get it to work with my
ISP's two news servers, text.news.blueyonder.co.uk (no binaries) and
news.blueyonder.co.uk, both of which work fine with the KNode and Pan
news clients.

I seem to have two problems.


1. The servers time out while leafnode is "considering" articles to
   download.  For example:

text.news.blueyonder.co.uk: reading server info
from /var/spool/news/leaf.node/text.news.blueyonder.co.uk
Merging in /var/spool/news/leaf.node/text.news.blueyonder.co.uk~ from
previous run
alt.religion.kibology: considering articles 48065 - 48078
alt.religion.kibology: 13 articles fetched, 1 killed
news.answers: no new articles
news.announce.newusers: no new articles
news.newusers.questions: no new articles
news.groups.questions: no new articles
news.software.readers: considering articles 21161 - 21162
news.software.readers: 2 articles fetched, 0 killed
alt.test: considering articles 267867 - 268263
Server disconnection or timeout before article could be retrieved #1
Warning: aborting fetch from text.news.blueyonder.co.uk due to previous
condition.
text.news.blueyonder.co.uk: conversation completed, disconnected.
wrote active file with 8171 lines
Started process to update overview data in the background.
Network activity has finished.


2. The processes started by the hourly fetchnews cron job stay alive
   and hold the lock file for a *long* time and prevent subsequent
   jobs from starting.  They don't appear to do anything according to
   `top` and find `/var/spool/news -mmin -5` (for example).


/var/spool/news $ ps aux|grep news
news      9485  0.0  0.1   4488  1228 ?        Ss   09:08   0:00 /bin/sh -c if [ -x /etc/news/leafnode/do-fetch-news ]; then /etc/news/leafnode/do-fetch-news; fi
news      9487  0.0  0.1   4492  1260 ?        S    09:08   0:00 /bin/sh /etc/news/leafnode/do-fetch-news
news      9489  0.0  0.3   4616  3016 ?        S    09:08   0:01 /usr/sbin/fetchnews
102       9490  0.0  0.1   4516  1372 ?        S    09:08   0:00 /usr/sbin/sendmail -i -FCronDaemon -oem news

/var/spool/news $ date
Tue Jun  7 14:56:50 BST 2005

    Killing 9489 (in this case) removes the lock file, stops the
    related processes and allows the next cron job to start, but the
    problem recurs.

Here's the customized part of /etc/news/leafnode/config:

server = text.news.blueyonder.co.uk
expire = 25
timeout = 25
initialfetch = 200
noxover = 1

server = news.blueyonder.co.uk
expire = 25
timeout = 25
initialfetch = 200
noxover = 1

#maxlines = 5000
#linebuffer = 1
debugmode = 1
timeout_fetchnews = 60


I've tried setting various values of timeout_fetchnews and toggling
noxover.


I'd appreciate any further debugging suggestions.

Thanks,
Adam