[leafnode-list] Re: news.mozilla.org: reading new newsgroups failed, reason "501 no such list available"

[clemens fischer]

On Mon-2009/03/30-09:38 Matthias Andree wrote:

> nodesc suppresses retrieving descriptions, whereas the failing
> operation  is retrieving new newsgroups.
> 
> However, it's Giganews's job to deploy conformant software, not the
> clients' duty to work around protocol violations on servers.
> 
> WRT Clemens's question whether or not the error is visible, that
> depends  on syslog and fetchnews configuration: where does fetchnews
> log (console,  console with redirection, syslog), does syslog capture
> the message, will  syslog copy to consoles?

No, I didn't mean "find the problem in the logs", I meant "there is no
such problem here".  I just looked up the IPs reckoning Giganews might
use different servers in different countries (like germany), but it
tracks back to the US.

It is interesting which groups are fetched from news.mozilla.org:

$ grep . /news/leaf.node/news.mozilla.org
/news/leaf.node/news.mozilla.org:alt.fr.ascii-art 1
/news/leaf.node/news.mozilla.org:alt.test.clienttest 1
/news/leaf.node/news.mozilla.org:gmane.comp.security.freecerts 1
/news/leaf.node/news.mozilla.org:gmane.comp.security.freecerts.german 1
/news/leaf.node/news.mozilla.org:local.archive 1
/news/leaf.node/news.mozilla.org:mozilla.dev.tech.crypto 7494
/news/leaf.node/news.mozilla.org:mozilla.dev.tech.javascript 1305
/news/leaf.node/news.mozilla.org:netbsd.current-users 1

This is the complete file!

But since you ask: Fetchnews(8) is running runit(8) supervised and I get
logs in the service log and syslog(3)ed.  I wonder why these syslog-
records are necessary.  The actual command line is "${fetchnews} -e -D
${debug_mask} -vvv".  To me this reads "-e Redirect logging from syslog
to the standard error channel (stderr)".  And before you ask:  it is not
really fetchnews being supervised, it is the final "exec /bin/sleep
${interval}".  This way I can fetch news early or delayed or not at all
without having to mess with crontabs or so.


clemens