[Pan-users] Re: Purging headers

[Duncan]

Joe Zeff <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Thu, 04 Dec 2008 23:43:27
-0800:

> My news server went down and I had to change to a different server at
> that service.  Alas, the servers use different article numbers.  (It's
> cheap; what do you expect?)  Their tech support tells me that I'll have
> to purge the headers to get things working again.  How do I do this,
> without ending up with hundreds of old messages marked unread, or will I
> just have to play with it after I'm done?

Unfortunately, I believe this depends on whether the messages are still 
in cache or not.  Pan tracks read-messages using the per-server article 
numbers.  This works just fine when it's pulling everything down 
concurrently from all servers, but configure a new one or have the 
article numbers disrupted on an old one, and the real-time tracking it 
does when pulling them down gets disrupted.

You can setup a new server while keeping the old one, and for messages 
still in-cache, pan /should/ (I'm not sure it actually does, but it's 
feasible with in-cache articles) be able to see the message-ids 
correspond to messages it still has marked as read on the old server.

But if the messages aren't in-cache, it has no way to do that mapping, 
and they'll all appear new (I think).

The biggest biggest catch on the cache thing (ha! yeah, I know it's 
pronounced like cash as in money, but it's still amusing! =:^) is that by 
default, pan's message cache is only 10 MB.  For years I've run with a 
multi-gig cache, however, and have something like two years of text 
messages (not quite a gig) now on my text instance cache, and when I run 
my binary instance which isn't so often any more, I do several gigs 
download all at once, then go back thru them, deleting as I go, and purge 
the 12-gig dedicated pan binary instance cache disk partition when I'm 
done.  So at least here, for text messages, if the above works, I 
shouldn't have to worry (and for binaries I've not done them in long 
enough I'd be downloading all-new off the server).

In new-pan, the cache size setting is a direct-text-file-edit tweak only, 
so few people will have changed it from the default 10 MB unless they 
were motivated enough to go doing it there.  Of course, I was/am so 
motivated.  =:^)

-- 
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