[leafnode-list] Re: "References: does not contain @" - and articles get deleted. :-(

[Matthias Andree]

Alan Mackenzie <acm at muc.de> writes:

> I've just moved my Leafnode spool from Leafnode 1.9.19 to Leafnode
> 1.11.2.rel, as packaged by Debian Sarge.  My kernel is Linux 2.6.8.
> (Hey, if you want me to upgrade more often, you should leave more bugs
> in the older versions.  ;-)

There's enough in 1.11.5 to make you upgrade to
Debian 3.2 in the year 2012 or so. :-P

> Looking at my /var/log/syslog, I see messages such as:
>
> Jul 16 15:28:41 localhost leafnode[2286]: illegal line for article 2637 in .overview for /mnt/hdg12/experiment-spool-news/talk/\politics/crypto: References: does not contain @
>
> , and indeed there was a technical irregularity in the References:
> header in both the article and the .overview file.  The offending
> fragment of the header looked like this:
>
> <IPaJ3.158$3l4.16260 at typhoon-sf.snfc21.pbi.net> <tlb <37FA077A.2FBA53C0 at arl.mil>
>                                                 ^^^^^

Confirmed for 1.11.5, too.

I'll need to review several parts of the code to pick the best approach
to avoid the deletion - parts that depend on proper References:
formatting must then be able to handle such corrupted headers properly,
or some part of leafnode needs to drop the broken ID, but that cannot
easily happen from an existing spool after leafnode upgrades.

> However, I'm unhappy that Leafnode has just deleted articles like this,
> without asking me, and without even leaving a meaningful record (such as
> a Message-Id:) of what it has deleted.  Luckily, I didn't lose anything,
> since I had copied the entire spool to a new (faster) hard drive.

And we're lucky to know what exactly caused it.

When it deletes the article, it may not have the Message-ID, but it has
the reliable article number and group because that's its access method
(it's trying to reconstruct the .overview data at the
time). Unfortunately that requires prior -vvv (verbose) logs to make
sense.

-- 
Matthias Andree