I wrote: : This would appear to be the cause of a problem I'm seeing, which is : that all of the newsreaders I've tried against the server (0.88.3) : falsely report groups that have articles as being empty, and therefore : beneath notice. As far as Netscape is concerned, nothing's there. : With trn, explicitly entering a group anyway usually shows a handful : of available articles. Some more investigation shows that this appears to be a problem with the caching of active files. The active file for the remote server gets updated immediately, as nntpcache.servers instructs: * information-retrieval.village.org 119 0.0.0.0 0 1h However, the active file that gets returned to the client never changes: -rw-r--r-- 1 news 9228 Aug 8 16:26 active -rw-r--r-- 1 news 9188 Aug 8 18:06 active.information-retrieval.village.org -rw-r--r-- 1 news 9 Aug 8 18:06 active.information-retrieval.village.org.hash -rw-r--r-- 1 news 1736 Aug 7 23:51 active.times -rw-r--r-- 1 news 1700 Aug 8 18:06 active.times.information-retrieval.village.org -rw-r--r-- 1 news 9 Jul 31 22:59 active.times.information-retrieval.village.org.hash The information log shows that it is trying to update the cache (executable paths and timestamps elided, but all are between 18:06:32 and 18:06:36, remaining long lines broken and indented): nntpcached[12528]: 'overview.fmt' older than 'overview.fmt.information-retrieval.village.org'. collating nntpcached[12528]: 'active.information-retrieval.village.org' too old. rebuilding nntpcached-update[12659]: checking server information-retrieval.village.org for 'active' nntpcached[12658]: connect from unknown@fountain.village.org (204.144.255.37) nntpcached-update[12659]: spooling 'active' from information-retrieval.village.org -> memory nntpcached-update[12659]: 'active.times.information-retrieval.village.org' too old. rebuilding nntpcached-update[12659]: checking server information-retrieval.village.org for 'active.times' nntpcached-update[12659]: spooling 'active.times' from information-retrieval.village.org -> memory nntpcached-update[12659]: same hash for active.times.information-retrieval.village.org.tmp and active.times.information-retrieval.village.org, updating time for active.times.information-retrieval.village.org It's not completely clear to me how `active' gets updated from `active.$server', so I'm not real sure where to go from here. Suggestions? Dworkin
