walt posted on Sat, 16 Jun 2012 18:20:41 -0700 as excerpted: > During my attempt to debug pan.ssl, I set the number of connections to > zero for one of my for-pay servers. > > I just tried to post via that same server and pan gave me no clue that > my attempted post had failed. That left me wondering why my post never > appeared. > > Thanks Heinrich.
The zero-connections case is an interesting one. Earlier on (after the rewrite but still under Charles), pan allowed it, but would constantly popup warnings against the server because it didn't see zero as special, meaning that the user really wanted no connections, but simply as don't actually make any connections, but still create (obviously stalled) tasks. That didn't seem to make a lot of sense to a lot of users, including me, and there was a request for a way to temporarily disable a server (say if one's quota had run out for the month), so the obvious solution was to use zero connections as a way to simply tell pan to ignore that server, while still keeping it configured and re-enablable later. So that's what was implemented. IDR exactly when, but I /think/ it was one of the patches khaley took during the period many users were using his repo as there had been no action on the official gnome repo for some time (which would have put it after Charles, but before Petr and definitely before Heinrich). I'm actually using that functionality here for a slightly different purpose these days. My ISP dropped its news service maybe 2-3 years ago now, but I had several years of archives for my regular cox.* newsgroups saved up (no-expire for that server, in my pan text instance, with only about a gig out of a 5 gig or so cache used, so neither headers nor messages were expired) and don't want them killed just because cox dropped the service. Actually, cox's outsourced provider kept the service alive for free for cox users for about six more months as a promotion, but when they too dropped it and I could no longer get access, I simply set the account to zero connections, basically permanently. Those groups are now read-only local-cache unless/until I sign up with a provider that happens to still carry them (assuming they're not either abandoned entirely or spam wastelands by then). So "temporarily disabled" is pretty much "permanently disabled, but I still want them archived", in my case. So whatever is done, let's not damage the ability of "zero connections" to work for telling pan that that server should be disabled, no attempts made to connect, and at least normally, no tasks queued for it or warnings about it, because something set to zero connections is deliberately disabled. That said, article posting warnings are arguably an exception. Because of the way pan handles choosing which server to post to, via posting profile, with the posting profile chosen per group, not a direct server chosen per group, it's quite plausible that a user could entirely forget that a particular posting profile is set to post to a now disabled server, and that said posting profile is the one he used for a group so it's that now disabled server it's set to post thru. Thus, ONLY for posts to disabled servers (but DEFINITELY NOT for get headers), an exception could be made, such that a warning is generated if the post is set to be made to a 0-connection/disabled server. If it's not too difficult to handle that as an exception to otherwise no warnings at all about 0-connection servers. Because I know I'm not the only one who USES that server-disable feature, and it would be, and was before, VERY annoying to have stalled tasks, etc, for a server we had deliberately set to 0 connections, thus, in our minds at least, deliberately disabling it. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
