Charlie Gibbs wrote: > Running Buster: > Linux cjglap2 4.19.0-20-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.235-1 (2022-03-17) > x86_64 GNU/Linux > > Today when I tried reading Usenet I ran into problems. I use slrnpull > to fetch news from a server - that part still works. When I run slrn to > read the news, it comes up with the normal list of newsgroups and number > of new messages in each group. If I then try to enter one of the > groups, the status line says "Selecting <groupname> ...", quickly > followed by "Server read failed." At this point I'm not trying to > access the NNTP server; the messages have already been downloaded by > slrnpull, and I can see them in (for example) > /var/spool/slrnpull/news/linux/debian/user. I did notice that a number > of files containing articles which I downloaded yesterday now have a > length of zero. > > ~/.slrnrc and ~/.jnewsrc appear to be intact. > > It might be a coincidence, but the laptop I read news on had its battery > run down overnight. Normally this isn't a problem; it's always > successfully cleaned up the file systems on re-boot. Searching the web > for "slrn server read failed" draws a blank. Any suggestions where to > look next?
i have four thoughts. first one would be to do a fsck on that file system (after unmounting it). second one is to restore from backup or redownload articles after running the expire process. third one would be to start over with a clean spool and then just grab the most recent few hundred articles for each newsgroup you want to read. and the last is maybe the least intrusive would be to test something out by deleting an empty file. will you be able to redownload it? try it and see what happens for one article and if you can then perhaps you can write a script that would get rid of all the zero length files and then be able to redownload them or expire them or something. i'm not at all familiar with slrn's spooling or structure since i've been using leafnode ever since i started usenet. leafnode has a process that goes through and checks consistency and will rebuild an overview file for a group but i've never had a problem with it truncating contents to zero. songbird
