[Pan-users] Re: can't fetch news

[Duncan]

"arnuld" <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted
below, on  Fri, 02 May 2008 10:36:41 +0530:

> I am using PAN 0.14.2.91 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. It was working
> fine from last one month but suddenly just yesterday it stopped fetching
> any news.

First, just letting you know that the pan 0.14.x series is deprecated and 
no longer considered supported.  That is, the code is what it is, there's 
no further development or bugfixing happening on that series.  Further, 
few to no regulars here use it anymore and have forgotten the details of 
how it worked.  The recommendation is to upgrade to the 0.1xx series, 
0.132 being the latest, available in source form or binary for many 
distributions.  There are some changes it'll take some getting used to, 
but it does scale better (MUCH better!) particularly in binary groups, 
and has fully automated and transparent server support, now.

Never-the-less, we still try our best to help those still using the old 
version, which you may indeed wish to stick to particularly if you don't 
do binaries or multiple servers.  FWIW, I still have the old version 
installed here, just so I can open it and reference the menus, etc, if I 
need to.  But I'm actually using only the newer version.

However, it doesn't appear from the below that your problem is version or 
indeed pan specific.  We'll see...

> This is what I got from Log-Viewer:

[from a fresh start, init messages snipped]

> Fri, 02 May 2008 16:07:13 - News server connection count: 0 
> Fri, 02 May 2008 16:07:13 - Loaded 5 groups for server "aioe" in 0.0
> seconds (5000 groups/sec)

So starting with no open connections, load the groups locally, and...
> Fri, 02 May 2008 16:07:13 - New connection 0x841a298 for news.aioe.org,
> port 119
> Fri, 02 May 2008 16:07:14 - NNTP handshake failed: 500 Too long
> connection
> Fri, 02 May 2008 16:07:14 - Handshake failed: 500 Too long
> connection 
> Fri, 02 May 2008 16:07:14 - News server connection count: 1

> Fri, 02 May 2008 16:07:14 - GLib - file giochannel.c: line 1000
> (g_io_channel_set_buffered): assertion `!channel->read_buf ||
> channel->read_buf->len == 0' failed
> Fri, 02 May 2008 16:07:14 - GLib - file giochannel.c: line 1000
> (g_io_channel_set_buffered): assertion `!channel->read_buf ||
> channel->read_buf->len == 0' failed

These glib assertions are apparently because pan doesn't expect the 
connection to fail as it did according to the log above, and when it 
tries to read the buffer on the failed connection, it can't.

> Fri, 02 May 2008 16:07:14 - Unable to set group "comp.lang.c": 
> Fri, 02 May 2008 16:07:14 - News server connection count: 0 

... But thanks to decent programming, the assertions are handled, and pan 
recovers reasonably gracefully, under the circumstances, voiding the 
unexpectedly invalid connection, returning connection count to zero.

> Fri, 02 May 2008 16:07:14 - New connection 0x8420980 for news.aioe.org,
> port 119 Fri, 02
> May 2008 16:07:14 - NNTP handshake failed: 500 Too long connection

[ Etc. snipped...]  

The cycle repeating as pan attempts to open connections for each of the 
other groups of the five.

> I don't think the problem is with PAN because gnus (emacs newsreader)
> has also stopped fetching news :(

You are correct.  According to the error, your news server is closing the 
connection immediately after it is opened, timing it out as if you had 
been inactive for however many minutes (commonly 15-ish) the timeout is 
supposed to be set for.

So if the log is correct, as it would seem to be or you'd not have the 
same problem with gnus, the problem isn't your end, but the server.  It's 
apparently misconfigured.  I'd suggest contacting aioe.org support and 
seeing what they can do, but first...

There's one more thing you can check.  See if you can connect to other 
news servers.  Some free ones you might try are msnews.com (microsoft 
groups, it used to be free at least years ago when I was on MS, I suppose 
it still is) and news.gmane.org.  Actually, you might find gmane rather 
useful.  It's a mailing list to news gateway, and is in fact how I 
participate on this list, seeing it as a newsgroup using pan.  For 
details, see the web site at http://gmane.org .  You'll almost certainly 
want to do so before trying to post to any gmane group, anyway, if you 
find it interesting and useful, but for our immediate purposes of testing 
just to make sure you can get news from /some/ news server, you can just 
setup a new news server pointed at news.gmane.org, and see if you can 
connect and download anything.  If you can, from either msnews or gmane 
(or anyone else for that matter), then you know your client isn't screwed 
up and it's almost /certain/ to be a server problem.  Of course, if you 
can't successfully connect to either msnews or gmane either, well, then 
you have a different problem we can try to work on.

In any case, please let us know how things go. =8^)

-- 
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