[leafnode-list] Upgrade oddity: 4294967295 in groupinfo

[Reiner Steib <4uce.02.r.steib@xxxxxxx>]

Some weeks ago, I upgraded from leafnode-1.9.18 to
leafnode-2.0.0.alpha20020921a. Because I didn't want to lose the
article numbers, I tried to fix the existing spool a described in
UPDATING:

,----
| 1. FIX local.groups: [...]
| 2. To fix the "remote" groups, run fetchnews -f
| 3. To fix the spool to be able to access old articles by Message-IDs,
|    run texpire -r
`----

(BTW: I couldn't access the old article by MID after this, but I
didn't care, because I have quite short expiry time anyhow (expire =
4).

Now I noticed, that some groups behave quite odd. It seems that groups
that had no articles at the time I was upgrading are involved. E.g.
the group `de.admin.lists' (moderated, only 3 new postings at the
beginning of each month).

The groupinfo file looks like this:

,----[ grep de.admin.lists groupinfo|cat -T ]
| de.admin.lists^Im^I4294967295^I1^I1034943685^IFuer Statistiken. [...]
`----

The number 4294967295 looks strange (or does it have special meaning
in the groupinfo file)?: 4294967295 = 2^32-1 = `printf "%u" -1`

The spool directory looks like this:

/var/spool/news/de/admin/lists# ls -lA
total 43
-rw-r--r--    1 news     news            0 Nov  1 05:30 .last.posting
-rw-rw----    1 news     news          719 Nov  4 18:05 .overview
-rw-r--r--    2 news     news        16536 Nov  1 05:30 0
-rw-r--r--    2 news     news         4451 Nov  1 05:30 1
-rw-r--r--    2 news     news        18385 Nov  1 05:30 2

However, I cannot read this group now, neither with Gnus, nor with
slrn. Here's the output of strace(1) (last lines, I can show more if
needed), when I enter the group in slrn:

,----
| rename(".overview.Q8Rihl", ".overview") = 0
| getcwd("/var/spool/news/de/admin/lists", 4096) = 31
| write(1, "224 Overview information for pos"..., 44) = 44
| write(1, "0\tPostingstatistik fuer den Bere"..., 246) = 246
| rt_sigaction(SIGALRM, {0x80584e0, [], \
| SA_RESTART|SA_NOCLDSTOP|0x4000000}, NULL, 8) = 0
| alarm(300)                              = 0
| read(0, "XOVER -2147483648-2147483647\r\n", 4096) = 30
| alarm(0)                                = 300
| wait4(-1, NULL, WNOHANG, NULL)          = -1 ECHILD (No child processes)
| stat64("/var/spool/news/interesting.groups/de.admin.lists",\
| {st_mode=S_IFREG|0664, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
| time(NULL)                              = 1036430350
| utime("/var/spool/news/interesting.groups/de.admin.lists", \
| [2002/11/04-18:19:10, 2002/07/31-19:31:09]) = 0
| write(1, "502 Usage: XOVER [first[-[last]]"..., 35) = 35
| rt_sigaction(SIGALRM, {0x80584e0, [], \
| SA_RESTART|SA_NOCLDSTOP|0x4000000}, NULL, 8) = 0
| alarm(300)                              = 0
`----

AFAICS, the number 4294967295 caused the problem. Last week I had the
same problem (with gnus.test) and finally `solved' it by editing
groupinfo and /gnus/test/.overview and renaming the article files. But
I guess there should be better solution. Did I miss something during
the upgrade?

Bye, Reiner.

P.S.: Maybe this is useful too:

,----[ echo 'listgroup de.admin.lists'|netcat -w2 localhost nntp ]
| 200 Leafnode NNTP daemon, version 2.0.0.alpha20020921a at theotp5.[...]
| 211 Article list for de.admin.lists (0-2) follows
| 0
| 1
| 2
| .
`----

,----[ echo 'group de.admin.lists'|netcat -w3 localhost nntp ]
| 200 Leafnode NNTP daemon, version 2.0.0.alpha20020921a at theotp5.[...]
| 211 3 0 4294967295 de.admin.lists group selected
`----
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo--- PGP key available via WWW   http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

-- 
leafnode-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- mailing list for leafnode
To unsubscribe, send mail with "unsubscribe" in the subject to the list