Re: on downloading too much data when there's no news

["Adam Sjøgren" <asjo@koldfront.dk>]

Wayne writes:

> Every time I check for new news, about 12 KiB of data is downloaded

Spying a little with ngrep:

If I don't have any subscriptions on news.fidonet.fi, Gnus issues a LIST
command, which returns all the newsgroups on the server, every time I
check for news. Seems excessive, but ok.

Next test is subscribing to fidonews. When I check news, Gnus then
issues a "LIST ACTIVE fidonews" command. Which also returns a list of
all newsgroups. Huh, I expected it to only return information for the
group fidonews.

Usually "LIST ACTIVE <newsgroup>" only returns the group asked for, I
think. For example, talking to another newsserver, running INN:

  asjo@tullinup:~$ telnet news.gmane.io nntp
  Trying 116.202.254.214...
  Connected to ciao.gmane.io.
  Escape character is '^]'.
  200 news.gmane.io InterNetNews NNRP server INN 2.6.3 ready (posting ok)
  LIST ACTIVE gmane.test
  215 Newsgroups in form "group high low status"
  gmane.test 0000008623 0000000051 m
  .
  QUIT
  205 Bye!
  Connection closed by foreign host.
  asjo@tullinup:~$ 

But news.fidonet.fi returns the full list:

  asjo@tullinup:~$ telnet news.fidonet.fi nntp
  Trying 2001:41d0:401:3100::1030...
  Connected to news.fidonet.fi.
  Escape character is '^]'.
  200 Welcome to SmapiNNTPd/Linux/IPv6 1.3 (posting may be allowed)
  AUTHINFO USER XXX
  381 Received login name, now send password
  AUTHINFO PASS YYY
  281 Authentication accepted
  LIST ACTIVE fidonews
  215 List of newsgroups follows
  fido7.su.pol 41628 1 y
  fido7.su.pol.history 283 1 y
    [...]
  zyxel 0 0 y
  netmail 0 0 y
  +getaccess+ 14 1 y
  +localchat+ 59 1 y
  +localtest+ 104 1 y
  .
  QUIT
  205 Goodbye
  Connection closed by foreign host.
  asjo@tullinup:~$ 

So it looks like it's specific to news.fidonet.fi.

Maybe Thunderbird uses a different method than "LIST ACTIVE <newsgroup>"
to check for news?

Yeah, Thunderbird doesn't use "LIST ACTIVE fidonews", instead it does a
"GROUP fidonews". Which in the case of news.fidonet.fi (SmapiNNTPd/
Linux/IPv6 1.3) makes a difference.

Maybe Gnus should detect that the server doesn't do LIST ACTIVE -
because HELP on it says:

  200 Welcome to SmapiNNTPd/Linux/IPv6 1.3 (posting may be allowed)
  HELP
  100 Help text follows
  Recognized commands:

  ARTICLE
  AUTHINFO
  BODY
  GROUP
  HEAD
  HELP
  IHAVE (not implemented, messages are always rejected)
  LAST
  LIST
  NEWGROUPS (not implemented, always returns an empty list)
  NEWNEWS (not implemented, always returns an empty list)
  NEXT
  QUIT
  SLAVE (has no effect)
  STAT
  XOVER (partially implemented, byte count and line count are always empty)

  SmapiNNTPd supports most of RFC-977 and also has support for AUTHINFO and
  limited XOVER support (RFC-2980)
  .

But now we are deeper into how Gnus works than what I know :-)


  Best regards,

    Adam

-- 
 "Jabba the Hutt meets Rudolf the Reindeer. I dunno,        Adam Sjøgren
  Mom."                                                asjo@koldfront.dk