[leafnode-list] Re: Downloading old articles

[Whiskers]

On Tue, 3 Nov 2009 15:33:37 +0100 Marcin Dziwnowski
<m.dziwnowski at gmail.com> wrote:

[...]

> I am pretty
> confident, but not 100% sure, that the server leafnode downloads from
> has more articles and it allows downloading them.

Telnet into the server and send it the GROUP command specifying the group 
you're interested in; "Assuming the group specified exists, the server 
returns to the client the numbers of the first and last articles currently 
in the group, along with an estimate of the number of messages in the 
group. The server's internal article pointer is also set to the first 
message in the group." 
<http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_NNTPCommands-2.htm>.

If you then fetch the first article the date of it will indicate how far 
back the articles are retained for that group on that server.

> Is there a way to make fetchnews copy more articles? Or maybe some
> smarter tool for the job? Preferably a tool that would run under
> Linux.
> 
> I apologize if this mail is off-topic.

I think the easiest way would be to use a newsreader to connect directly 
to the server (not to your Leafnode) and subscribe to that group and 
download all the messages.  You might have to over-ride a 'maximum number 
of messages' setting first.  Slrn+slrnpull would create a local spool in 
text format which should be easy to manipulate.  Other newsreaders (or
news-servers) could do much the same, of course.

If you set up more than one local news-server on your system or network, 
make sure you specify a different port for accessing each one, and keep 
the spools etc apart  ;))

-- 
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
--  Whiskers 
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