[Pan-users] Re: PAN and Kubuntu

[Duncan]

André Fettouhi <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Tue, 14 Nov 2006 09:57:48
+0100:

> I have just started using PAN and I have some small problems with it.
> When I download rar files, sometime PAN says that a file is
> broken/corrupted and hence is not saved. My question is how can I get it
> to save the corrupted file? Because when I'm done downloading I'm
> missing more files than I have par files (and there no more available
> for the files, i.e. posted) hence I cannot repair the archives. What do
> I do then?

This ? in its various forms is becoming a FAQ.  Here's what I do.  It
works for me.

First, I prefer downloading (gigs at a time) to cache, going to work or to
bed or doing something else, then coming back when it's all in cache and
doing the actual saving or whatever, over the direct download and save
method.  Whichever way you do it for normal files, you will likely find
you have to download to cache (not download and save directly) for the
problem files.  

The biggest problem with downloading to cache is that pan doesn't by
default keep a very large cache.  The default is 10MB I believe,
sufficient for a decent amount of text and for download and save, but
obviously not for gigabytes worth of download to cache.  There's no GUI
cache size setting, but it can be changed by editing pan's preferences.xml
file directly (in the ~/.pan2 dir by default).  It's an int setting,
name=cache-size-megs.  I have my binary pan instance cache on a dedicated
12 gig partition, with the cache size set accordingly.

Once I have the constituent posts in cache, if I have problems with a
particular file (or sometimes everything from a particular poster), I use
the Save option, but choose As Text, NOT attachments.  That saves the
entire raw posts, headers and all.  You'll want to save to a scratch dir
as there will likely be several raw posts per file.  (pan normally denotes
this with the (/nn) notation, where nn is the number of posts).

Now, use something a bit less particular about the files it saves.  I use
uudeview, which saves anything that looks like an attachment, and even has
a "desperate" mode for being even /less/ particular.  That will get you
the semi-corrupted files, but normally good enough to recover most of the
data intact in the form of good par2 blocks, hopefully giving you enough
good blocks to complete the recovery.  I don't believe I've had it fail me
here yet, since I subscribed to newshosting anyway.  (My ISP's servers
aren't so good, unfortunately.)

-- 
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