[Pan-users] Re: Pan not changing posting news server.

[Duncan]

terryc posted on Sat, 05 Sep 2009 14:09:32 +1000 as excerpted:

> my ISp Exetel changed my static IP address and now I do not have news
> access to the old news server.
> 
> So, in pan I moved it to fallback and moved eternal-september up to
> primary.
> 
> Problem is that Pan persists in trying to post to old news reader.
> 
> What is the proceddure to swap news servers

There's two issues you'll likely have here.

1) Posting, as you mentioned.

This one's because you don't understand the logic behind what pan does 
with posting, or it'd not be a problem.  Thus, that's what I really need 
to explain.

It's perfectly logical if you think of it that way:  Where do you 
configure anything about posting?  The posting profile!  What is the 
choice of where the post goes, if not part of the information you 
configure for posting.  Where is all the information for posting 
configured?  The posting profile!

So, your problem is simply that the posting profile is still set to the 
original server.  Go to posting profiles, choose the one you want to 
change if you have several, and choose the appropriate server from the 
list.


2) Fallback does NOT equal disabled.

People often experience problems because they expect the fallback server 
to be disabled unless a post doesn't appear on the regular server, and 
that it's no big deal if a connection can't be made to it.  But it 
doesn't work that way.  Think about it.  How would pan /know/ that a 
message wasn't on the main server(s), unless it contacted the fallback(s) 
to see what messages it (they) had that the main server(s) didn't.

So when you tell pan to get overviews (aka headers, tho technically, 
it's /not/ headers, only a very limited subset of headers, thus the term 
"overview"), it tries to connect to /all/ servers including fallbacks, to 
download at /least/ overviews.

Unfortunately, pan doesn't really have a way, at least built-in, to 
disable a server without removing it entirely.  There /is/ a manual way 
around that, but it involves changing the files around when pan's not 
running, so it basically doesn't realize the other server was ever 
there.  In pan's data dir, ~/.pan2/ by default, the server config is kept 
in a file called servers.xml.  Basically, what you do is you create two 
copies of this file, one with the server you want temporarily disabled in 
it (that's the one you have now), one carefully edited to remove the  
server you want to temporarily disable, while keeping the xml format 
intact so pan can still parse it.  Name each one something different, say 
servers.all.xml and servers.disabled.xml.  Then either create servers.xml 
as a symlink pointing to the appropriate one, or copy the one you want to 
servers.xml.  Either way, when you want to switch, simply shut down pan, 
and either re-point the symlink at the appropriate one, or copy the 
appropriate one over servers.xml, so servers.xml now has the 
configuration you want once again.  Then restart pan.

If you know a bit of shell scripting, it's reasonably easy to automate 
the process, perhaps creating two different scripts that setup 
servers.xml appropriately, before starting pan, so you can then invoke 
whichever one instead of invoking pan directly.  Or, you can create a 
pan.switchserver script, that takes a single parameter, and based on it, 
either does the copy or repoints the symlink as necessary, and simply 
invoke that script with pan shut down, any time you wish to switch.  It's 
up to you.

But you may not have to worry about #2.  I've never had a situation here 
where I had to temporarily disable one like that, but we've had people 
post questions about it before, so I thought I'd mention it, in case you 
do see the issue.

-- 
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