Can't open offline nnimap groups

Can't open offline nnimap groups

[Steinar Bang]

Platform: Intel Pentium M, Ubuntu Dapper,
	  emacs21 21.4a-3ubuntu2
	  No Gnus v0.6 (CVS update from March 24)

I have some groups on an offline, agentized, nnimap groups.  Yesterday
I could access them.  But today they have * in front of them and Gnus
is telling me they don't exist:
 Retrieving newsgroup: nnimap+doohan:INBOX...
 Opening nnimap server on doohan...done
 No such group: INBOX
 gnus-select-newsgroup: Couldn't activate group nnimap+doohan:INBOX: No such group: INBOX

The laptop I'm running on was hung when going to suspend last night,
so I had to turn it off the hard way, and reboot it today.

I'm guessing some files have been corrupted.  Does anyone know what
files this may be, and what to look for?

Thanx!


- Steinar

Re: Can't open offline nnimap groups

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no>:

> I'm guessing some files have been corrupted.  Does anyone know what
> files this may be, and what to look for?

The ~/News/agent/nnimap/doohan/agent.lib/active file is null bytes.
Sounds like a likely culprit.

Is there some way to regenerate it with, or without access to the IMAP
server in question?

Thanx!

Re: Can't open offline nnimap groups

[Simon Josefsson]

Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> writes:

>>>>>> Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no>:
>
>> I'm guessing some files have been corrupted.  Does anyone know what
>> files this may be, and what to look for?
>
> The ~/News/agent/nnimap/doohan/agent.lib/active file is null bytes.
> Sounds like a likely culprit.
>
> Is there some way to regenerate it with, or without access to the IMAP
> server in question?

I believe it should be re-generated if you just remove the file.
However, do take a backup...

Re: Can't open offline nnimap groups

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>:

> I believe it should be re-generated if you just remove the file.
> However, do take a backup...

Of a null byte file...? :-)

Anyway I stopped Gnus, removed it, and then got the following message
when starting Gnus:

Reading active file from doohan via nnimap...
Opening nnimap server on doohan...done
Cannot read partial active file from nnimap server.

The active file is not recreated, ie. agent.lib has no active file.

Re: Can't open offline nnimap groups

[Simon Josefsson]

Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> writes:

>>>>>> Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>:
>
>> I believe it should be re-generated if you just remove the file.
>> However, do take a backup...
>
> Of a null byte file...? :-)

Other files might be destroyed.. :)

> Anyway I stopped Gnus, removed it, and then got the following message
> when starting Gnus:
>
> Reading active file from doohan via nnimap...
> Opening nnimap server on doohan...done
> Cannot read partial active file from nnimap server.
>
> The active file is not recreated, ie. agent.lib has no active file.

How about removing the entire agent.lib directory?

/Simon

Re: Can't open offline nnimap groups

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>:

> Other files might be destroyed.. :)

I copied .newsrc and .newsrc.eld.  I don't know what other files might
be affected.

>> The active file is not recreated, ie. agent.lib has no active file.

> How about removing the entire agent.lib directory?

The same:

Reading active file from doohan via nnimap...
Opening nnimap server on doohan...done
Cannot read partial active file from nnimap server.

during startup.

Re: Can't open offline nnimap groups

[Simon Josefsson]

Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> writes:

>>>>>> Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>:
>
>> Other files might be destroyed.. :)
>
> I copied .newsrc and .newsrc.eld.  I don't know what other files might
> be affected.
>
>>> The active file is not recreated, ie. agent.lib has no active file.
>
>> How about removing the entire agent.lib directory?
>
> The same:
>
> Reading active file from doohan via nnimap...
> Opening nnimap server on doohan...done
> Cannot read partial active file from nnimap server.
>
> during startup.

Try and remove the entire agent directory (~/News/agent), and
re-agentize the servers you want.  That is what I typically did when
something went wrong.  (But that has happened for me in recent years.)

Re: Can't open offline nnimap groups

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>:

> Try and remove the entire agent directory (~/News/agent), and
> re-agentize the servers you want.  That is what I typically did when
> something went wrong.  (But that has happened for me in recent
> years.)

This particular server will be offline for a few days (until I get
power back in the basement), so regenerating it is out...:-/

Oh well!  Thanx anyway! :-)

Re: Can't open offline nnimap groups

[Dave Goldberg]

Does gnus-agent-regenerate do anything useful?  It's done so for me
when my overview files get whacked but I've never run into the problem
you're seeing.

-- 
Dave Goldberg
david.goldberg6@verizon.net

Re: Can't open offline nnimap groups

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Dave Goldberg <david.goldberg6@verizon.net>:

> Does gnus-agent-regenerate do anything useful?  It's done so for me
> when my overview files get whacked but I've never run into the
> problem you're seeing.

I thought about doing it, but when Simon didn't suggest it I figured
it might be risky...:-)

Re: Can't open offline nnimap groups

[Simon Josefsson]

Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> writes:

>>>>>> Dave Goldberg <david.goldberg6@verizon.net>:
>
>> Does gnus-agent-regenerate do anything useful?  It's done so for me
>> when my overview files get whacked but I've never run into the
>> problem you're seeing.
>
> I thought about doing it, but when Simon didn't suggest it I figured
> it might be risky...:-)

It might work, although personally I find it easier to just wipe out
the entire agent directory and start from scratch when something goes
wrong.  If that would happen often enough, I would start to debug it,
but for me this hasn't happened in a long time now.

Some problems might be related to corrupted files -- sometimes when I
quit gnus, it will not really quit due to some reason (typically a
server don't want to close, possibly due to lost network connections),
and if I then accidentally press 's' my .newsrc.eld can be corrupt,
and I suspect some agent files might become corrupt too.

Re: Can't open offline nnimap groups

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>:

> Some problems might be related to corrupted files -- sometimes when
> I quit gnus, it will not really quit due to some reason (typically a
> server don't want to close, possibly due to lost network
> connections), and if I then accidentally press 's' my .newsrc.eld
> can be corrupt, and I suspect some agent files might become corrupt
> too.

May have been something like that in this case.  The laptop hung
during suspend (while Gnus was running in unplugged mode), so I had to
power it off the hard way.