[leafnode-list] Re: 423 Bad article number

[clemens fischer]

On Sun, 3 Dec 2006 17:56:05 +0100 Martin wrote:

> I want to avoid timeouts. Therefore I write some short files, e.g.
> 
> | authinfo user itsme at myhost
> | authinfo pass naturallysecret
> | group gmane.comp.sysutils.supervision.general
> | article 1349
> | quit
> 
> Then I use netcat to connect and send to the server. As I read somewhere
> on the net, bash 3.0 should be able to connect to other hosts using TCP,
> but netcat worked and still works.

netcat is much better suited to this kind of thing than bash, because
bash sure can use the net, but only with redirections like "<>
/dev/tcp/news.gmane.org/119".  netcat allows interactive and scripted
access, but the bash mechanism is more or less for scripts only.

> The "real" fix would be to do some better error-handling in
> getarticles() and in the calling place. Maybe negative numbers could be
> reserved for errors, and a total of zero fetched articles could be given
> back without some trouble.

agreed, but this error-handling touches the realms of internal
interfaces. for now i inserted the line you proposed into the code of
fetchnews.c, but didn't install it yet. given that only this one group
causes trouble, i have the following workaround in etc/leafnode/config
for the time beeing:

  server = news.gmane.org
  only_groups_pcre = ^gmane\.(?!comp\.sysutils\.supervision\.general)

this matches all the groups on gmane except for g.c.s.s.g.

nother question:  from what i read in configutil.c, there's only one
group_pcre member for any one instance of "struct serverlist".  if
i grasp the meaning correctly, i can only specify one single
only_groups_pcre per server.

so if the gmane-problem persists and without more robust behaviour re.
423 errors, would i need gigantic regex's because i can only specify a
single one?


regards, clemens