Re: [Pan-users] problem using 0.135? on Win7pro.

[Duncan]

Steve Davies posted on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 22:49:00 +0100 as excerpted:

> On 4 October 2011 22:26, Bruce Bowler wrote:
>> On Tue, 4 Oct 2011 22:04:14 +0100 Steve Davies wrote:
>>
>>> It looks from the source code as if Pan is asserting that a news
>>> article MUST have an article-id. What server are you connecting Pan
>>> to? NNTP really should not be able to distribute a group unless all
>>> articles have a unique id.
>>
>> 3 different servers...  Individual.net, gmane and a private one.
>>
> My personal suspicion would be a mis-configured private server, not
> creating article-ids automatically?
> 
> Does that match with what is being downloaded when the issue happens?

I'd rather guess that it's either a corner-case threading/race issue, or 
a filesystem issue.

The filesystem issue is particularly likely, I'd think, given that the 
problem went away after deleting a directory.  But there are two 
possibilities there as well.

1)  Do a thorough fsck (filesystem check, on MS it'd be scandisk unless 
they changed the name in the decade I've been off it), and watch for 
other hints that the disk might be failing, as I'm almost positive I 
remember a similar node assertion issue (that one on Linux) from back 
possibly five years (perhaps more, IIRC it was the the old C code pan, 
0.14.x) ago, that was the first sign of a disk that ultimately failed.  
After the disk finally failed and the reporter was running on a new 
install, the problem could not be duplicated, nor could anyone else 
duplicate it.

2)  POSIX based filesystems have far less restrictions in the characters 
allowed in filenames than MS filesystems do.  It's possible that 
someone's using an obscure and possibly non-RFC compliant Message-ID 
generation algorithm, that's generating message-ids with characters that 
pan /should/ escape but doesn't as it's not expecting those characters as 
they're illegal in message-ids to begin with.  Since pan uses the message-
id as the name of the message file in cache, this could create problems 
on MS systems with their more restricted filenames, while it would "just 
work" on POSIX filesystems.

Because enough stuff depends on message-ids that if they're not there at 
all, one would think the server would have far more problems than a few 
obscure clients such as pan choking.  But if the message-ids are there, 
but include illegal characters, many clients including pan on its native 
POSIX based platforms may not see a problem at all, even as it causes 
problems for pan on MS.

Certainly, such a problem should be traceable, but it would likely 
involve a debug session that many, including me, couldn't do without help.

-- 
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