Well, 0.87.9 seemed to fix my syslog, trn, and bogus directory problem.
Now it's time for the minor nits.
My syslog gets some messages like
nntpcached[4032] connect from charon-gw.spec.com
just like it should, but in other cases it is blank after the 'from'. Does
this mean the reverse lookup failed or that it lost track of where it came
from?
Posting is still not working properly (at least from trn, I will try
a few other readers). Trn hangs after sending the article (probably waiting
for a reply from the server); a CTL-C makes trn think it failed (the
dead.article message) but goes back into reading mode; but syslog shows
a successful post to our outside feed.
Could someone please explain what the timeout values really mean
in the nntpcache.servers file? I guess that the default 12h for active
means it only fetches a new active file every twelve hours, but what about
the default 24h for NewsGrp (formerly 'other')? Does that mean the tides
are only adjusted once a day? Several people complain that after they read
news, that their readers don't show any new articles for many hours, although
a force read on a group will show the new articles. Will changing NewsGrp
to 1h fix this without causing other problems?
And how exactly is an expire decided on? Will articles (assuming adequate
disk space) stay in the cache longer than they stay on the feeding server,
or are they dropped as they are dropped from the feed (ie., if the feed only
keeps alt.foo for one day, can I keep it in the cache for a week, and how
do I control how long)?
All in all, I think it is becoming a great program and nearly ready for
commercial use. Just caching the active file is a real bandwith saver
since many newsreaders seem to want to always fetch it on startup even
though it is several hundred k. The multiple feed feature is also nice,
as it allows us to merge arrogant Micro$oft's newsgroups into our real
newsfeed. How would it handle multiple feeds if the xrefs could overlap?
Keep up the good work,
frank
--
Frank Smith -- System Administrator E-mail: fsmith@spec.com
Systems & Processes Engineering Corp. (SPEC) Voice:(512) 306-1100 x154
401 Camp Craft Road Fax: (512) 306-1122
Austin, TX 78746-6558 Web: http://www.spec.com
