Teranews and NewsPro

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BlackCat
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Nov 27, 2005 2:54 pm

Teranews and NewsPro

Post by BlackCat »

How can I get NP to work with Teranews again?
In trying to get Teranews 'back' (after their new software gives 502 or 'Do not support this command' in Getting New Headers) NP locks up when I try to 'Reset the server'. It also locks up when I try to 'Delete this server'.
Any ideas how to get Teranews working properly otherwise?
[Lock up means: Ctrl+Alt+Del and finish task Newspro]

BC
blackdog56
Posts: 106
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 7:33 pm

Post by blackdog56 »

I dont get headers from it anymore. It works well on getting bodies by message id.
alex
Posts: 4514
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 5:57 pm

Post by alex »

try to wait, reset or delete server is pretty heavy operation it needs to scan through all groups and to delete all headers associated with the server.

if it takes too long reset newsgroup for the server and try again.
newspro uses the server newsgroup article range, maybe the server changed the range and it gives an error when articles are out of range.

also try not to define retention (define last headers instead), maybe the server doesn't support the XHDR command, i have no idea, i don't have access to their server.
BlackCat
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Nov 27, 2005 2:54 pm

Teranews and NewsPro

Post by BlackCat »

Tnx, Alex for your personal reaction. I checked and yes: the retention field is empty (default). You can see in a.b.n-s-c what shambles their new Software made of the servers from Teranews and Bubbanews. I did a 'get new newsgroups' lately and many NG's now show a header count of more than 100 million (10^8) articles. On the home page of Teranews is a list of suggested reactions for different Newsclients and I deduced that 'Reset Server' would be best for NP.
BTW I was *not* being sarcastic about the lock-up of NP. I am used to that since v. 1.37, if I remember correctly. Once or twice daily (or weekly, when I am quietly slurping binaries) is what I learned to live with.
Would UE really perform better in that aspect?
dengle
Posts: 274
Joined: Mon Jun 30, 2003 2:37 pm

Post by dengle »

If have been using UE HEAVILY since assisting Alex with beta testing it and have not had one lockup. Additionally, I have had well over 20 million headers loaded at once in UE. Try doing that in newspro!

A definite strong endorsement from this usenet poweruser! :-P
ChuckR
Posts: 4
Joined: Sun Mar 02, 2003 12:06 am

Post by ChuckR »

I have found that neither NewsPro nor WinVn will fetch headers from Teranews now. Well, not quite. In WinVn, I can fetch ALL headers for a newsgroup, but not less than all. That may be true with NewsPro as well, but I haven't tried it.

There was some comment in alt.free.newsservers about new server software being used there, and something about 64-bit article numbers, whatever that means. Anyway, as far as Teranews and its server software creators are concerned, it's working correctly, and reader clients which "fully" comply with - RFC whatever - will work with it. There are statements to that effect on that on teranews.com, together with a list of reader clients that have been tested and shown to work. NewsPro was not on the list the last time I looked.

In WinVn, when you try to download less than all articles, it spends a lot of time getting the headers, and then shows just one. My guess is that the article number being sent by the server is larger than the field available for it, so the excess is just truncated. But the effect, then, is that the retained portion of the article number consists of the most significant digits of the number, which are the same for all headers received. So WinVn concludes there is only one article.

My guess is that the same thing is going on with NewsPro. Just a guess, but a pretty good one, I think. Something like that anyway.

I don't know what software they are using, but if it comes to be used by more NNTP providers than just Teranews/Bubbanews, then this issue will have to be addressed as some point.

Hope this information is useful.
alex
Posts: 4514
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 5:57 pm

Post by alex »

for now i don't see any problem. numbers around 100M is no problem, up to 4GB is no problem with both programs.

maybe the reason was they switched their free server to their paid server and it is the server error gives for wrong article number range.

i'll keep looking, i need newsgroup which fails even after newsgroup reset.

they put leading zeros before article number in xover, thus adding to bandwidth (do they charge for header bandwidth?), but i checked in debug no problem with both newspro and ue (they are using different visual studio versions so i checked them both).
alex
Posts: 4514
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 5:57 pm

Post by alex »

i got some stupid reply from them, probably they pasted some standard reply, i won't waste forum space citing it here.

nothing concrete, maybe they don't understand much.

what they return 100M headers in newsgroup list command is apparently a bug in their server software (how else it should be called?)

in short if someone see this again try to reset the newsgroup and let me know, but i feel it was a temporary server problem which they chose not to talk about, especially if it was their free server probably they are using it for experiments (it can be concluded from their server status web page).

newspro won't use 100M headers from newsgroup list info, in workspace window it shows the actual number of downloaded headers.

some news services are only good if they are for free :)
alex
Posts: 4514
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 5:57 pm

Post by alex »

http://groups.google.com.ph/group/alt.f ... 981b11a037

so this is the problem then.

in short you in newspro and usenet explorer you cannot limit "last headers" when using the server, it is not possible in principle since the server doesn't have consequtive article number on per newsgroup basis but increases article numbers accross all groups instead (e.g. same article number in different newsgroups if crossposted)

otherwise it should work i guess

if the thread is correctly related teranews to yottanews i found some funny things there http://www.yottanews.com/faq.html they are telling that e.g. all nzb users are illegitimate (since nzb doesn't contain article numbers of yottanews for example).

it seems like a kind of abberation, given current usenet volume they should cross 32 bit article number border in about 2 years (if they still will be running then - with the current layout they are mostly serving nzb/search service users who don't use newsgroups in conventional way).
alex
Posts: 4514
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 5:57 pm

Post by alex »

i can think about this workaround (some kind of defining retention or limit):

right now they have about 100M headers with unique article numbers dispersed all over newsgroups.

say their retention is 20 days (i don't know, just a guess)

you want to download headers for last 10 days.

you just put 50M (50000000) in last headers field, about a half of what they have.
BlackCat
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Nov 27, 2005 2:54 pm

Teranews

Post by BlackCat »

Thanx, Alex for your work over this weekend. As per ur request I will answer in this thread. Teranews seems to be working 'properly' i.e.
it doesn't generate errors in the Task Manager 'Getting New headers' anymore. Also it starts DL-ing articles like Bubbanews did a few days earlier. Did they do a SW-change?
I cannot subscribe to Yottanews because I have a dial-up acount.
I will notify you when anything untowards happens again.

CU, BC.
ChuckR
Posts: 4
Joined: Sun Mar 02, 2003 12:06 am

Post by ChuckR »

I appreciate your work on this, Alex, but so long as they have this article numbering system, I think I just need to put them on Don't Get Headers and Msg-ID Direct. Anyway, I agree that there's nothing wrong with NewsPro.

I still don't understand why they did it this way. I don't see any advantage, and from the marketing viewpoint, their servers certainly appear to be inferior to others because of this.

Oh well.
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