[leafnode-list] Re: Leafnode not getting new groups

[Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@xxxxxx>]

Am 27.05.2011 01:32, schrieb Antoine Levitt:
> 27/05/11 01:17, Matthias Andree

>> - what file system is used for your /var/spool/news?
> 
> Ext4, it's not a weird NTFS or anything.

Right. mtime should work on the native Linux and BSD file systems.

>> - is there anything that modifies, touches, or otherwise change the
>> news.gwene.org "mtime" stat() attribute?  Leafnode touches the file to
>> record what time it had last used for "NEWGROUPS", and if the mtime gets
>> bumped (increased) behind leafnode's back, that's why it fails.
> 
> I don't think so. Only weird thing I can think of would be a suspend
> right in the middle of a leafnode check. Oh, and we got a time change
> march 27 over here, and it's not entirely impossible that troubles began
> around that date.

Daylight Savings Time changes shouldn't matter if handled properly,
because the GMT/UTC that is used to check for groups is continous and
doesn't leap ahead one hour.

The code also doesn't look like it were sensitive to suspends that cause
connection timeouts on the server.  The mtime is bumped (like with the
"touch" command) only after leafnode has downloaded all new groups and
descriptions from the server.

But I see that there are bugs in the error handling, depending on what
leafnode has last tried it doesn't detect the connection loss and still
touches the time, so the suspend may have caused it.  Good catch I'd
say. :-)

>> fetchnews -nvveD131 -S news.gwene.org | grep '^>NEWGROUPS'
> 
> antoine@lambda:~$ sudo fetchnews -nvveD131 -S news.gwene.org 2>&1 | grep -C4
> '^>NEWGROUPS'
>> DATE
> <111 20110526232643
> check_date: news.gwene.org: server time 1306452403, our time 1306452403
> news.gwene.org: checking for new newsgroups
>> NEWGROUPS 110526 232628 GMT
> <231 New newsgroups follow
> <.
> news.gwene.org: found 0 new newsgroups
> news.gwene.org: feedtype == NNTP.
> 
> Not sure how to understand this ...

Well, the first items pertain to checking if client (leafnode) and
server (INN) time are in synch (they are in your case), and to warn the
user if they are too far apart.

The second item requests the "groups added since 2011 May 26 23:26:28
UTC" -- this should be the time of the last successful fetchnews
connection to news.gmane.org.

>> After you've looked at all that, the recovery is to either simply run
>> "fetchnews -f" to fetch all group lists from all servers, or,
>> lighter-weight, to remove the last:news.gwene.org* files.  Either voids
>> some way to understand what has caused this.
> 
> I'll wait before doing this then.

It's now safe to run. I know where to look now, and what to look for.
Thanks for the report. :)
-- 
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