On Wed, 05 Oct 2011 08:34:53 +0000, Duncan wrote: > Steve Davies posted on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 22:49:00 +0100 as excerpted: > >> On 4 October 2011 22:26, Bruce Bowler wrote: >>> On Tue, 4 Oct 2011 22:04:14 +0100 Steve Davies wrote: >>> >>>> It looks from the source code as if Pan is asserting that a news >>>> article MUST have an article-id. What server are you connecting Pan >>>> to? NNTP really should not be able to distribute a group unless all >>>> articles have a unique id. >>> >>> 3 different servers... Individual.net, gmane and a private one. >>> >> My personal suspicion would be a mis-configured private server, not >> creating article-ids automatically? >> >> Does that match with what is being downloaded when the issue happens? > > I'd rather guess that it's either a corner-case threading/race issue, or > a filesystem issue. > > The filesystem issue is particularly likely, I'd think, given that the > problem went away after deleting a directory. But there are two > possibilities there as well. > > 1) Do a thorough fsck (filesystem check, on MS it'd be scandisk unless > they changed the name in the decade I've been off it), and watch for > other hints that the disk might be failing, as I'm almost positive I > remember a similar node assertion issue (that one on Linux) from back > possibly five years (perhaps more, IIRC it was the the old C code pan, > 0.14.x) ago, that was the first sign of a disk that ultimately failed. > After the disk finally failed and the reporter was running on a new > install, the problem could not be duplicated, nor could anyone else > duplicate it. > > 2) POSIX based filesystems have far less restrictions in the characters > allowed in filenames than MS filesystems do. It's possible that > someone's using an obscure and possibly non-RFC compliant Message-ID > generation algorithm, that's generating message-ids with characters that > pan /should/ escape but doesn't as it's not expecting those characters > as they're illegal in message-ids to begin with. Since pan uses the > message- > id as the name of the message file in cache, this could create problems > on MS systems with their more restricted filenames, while it would "just > work" on POSIX filesystems. > > Because enough stuff depends on message-ids that if they're not there at > all, one would think the server would have far more problems than a few > obscure clients such as pan choking. But if the message-ids are there, > but include illegal characters, many clients including pan on its native > POSIX based platforms may not see a problem at all, even as it causes > problems for pan on MS. > > Certainly, such a problem should be traceable, but it would likely > involve a debug session that many, including me, couldn't do without > help.
I've seen it on 2 completely independent machines so I don't think it's hardware :-) As for debugging, if I could cause the problem, I'd be happy to attempt debugging, but it appears to be completely random intervals and I'm not going to "debug" every time I use pan :-( To Steve's question about when it happens, I can't say for sure about what's being downloaded when the issue happens in terms of what server(s) might be active at the time. Can I set pan to only ever use 1 downloading thread? That way if/when it fails, I could note which group was "active" at the time and perhaps narrow it down to a particular server. Is it possible to get the assertion to provide a more descriptive error than "an assertion failed"? Non-descriptive errors remind me of the old DOS "general protection fault" errors... I can say that the last time it happened, when I discovered that "blowing way" the groups folder solved the problem, that there didn't appear to be any articles missing when it reloaded all the groups. Bruce _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
