[Pan-users] Re: A multi-server question

[Duncan]

Bruce Bowler <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun, 25 Mar 2007
13:05:09 +0000:

> Yep, editting newsrc-xxx seems to be, after a little playing around, the
> only way to do it.  That falls apart if pan ever decides to update the
> group list (or far more likely :-), I forget that I editted the file and
> tell pan to update the group list.

Thanks for confirming that editing newsrc-xxx is the way.  I suspected it 
was, but wasn't sure, so didn't claim it.

Meanwhile, when I'm afraid something automated will undo an edit I made 
to something, I make a backup, with a name I'm fairly confident won't be 
mistaken for something else and thus fairly confident won't be removed 
either by me or by some automated process.  For years, I've used my 
initials as an extension (thus copying it to newsrc-xxx.jed, since my 
initials are jed), as it's convenient, not an already commonly used 
extension, and instantly identifiable as my personal backup copy.  
Lately, I've taken to using the date, in SI standard little-endian order 
(so newsrc-xxx.20070325, if I were doing it today, or perhaps newsrc-
xxx.2007.03.25, or newsrc-xxx.20070325.jed, if I wanted to standardize on 
a single identifiable extension), especially for backups of configs that 
are reasonably likely to change over time, so I at least know how far 
back I'm going, if I end up falling back to it.  Creating so-denoted in-
place copies, combined with periodic backup snapshotting of various 
partitions on my system in case I fat-finger or have a partition-level 
hardware failure (on RAID-6, thus covering disk-level failure), keeps me 
relatively secure against such otherwise minor or major disasters.

-- 
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