Some thoughts on NoCeM and switching servers

Some thoughts on NoCeM and switching servers

[Scott Hofmann]

Recently, due to a job change, I switched NNTP servers. During the switch
I wound up fighting Gnus (both 5.4.66 and Quassia 0.5) at two separate
occasions, both of which should be easily remediable.

The first problem I had was in logging into the NNTP server. It's a secure
server that requires a login and password, so I initiallly set
nntp-authinfo-function to nntp-send-nosy-authinfo. When I ran gnus, it did
stuff in a backwards order: it connected to the NNTP server, and then asked for
the login information. This caused gnus to (apparently) hang while trying to
read the active file, because the NNTP server refused to talk to gnus. I was
able to solve this problem by adding nntp-send-nosy-authinfo to
nntp-server-opened-hook, which got gnus to do things in the correct order
(login, then fetch the active file). At the barest minimum, this should be
documented somewhere, preferably in the "Starting Up" section.

The second problem was with NoCeM. When there is no NoCeM/active file, it would
be nice if NoCeM behaved as if gnus-nocem-expiry-wait was set to 0 - on my new
NNTP server there were over 10,000 unread messages in news.lists.filters alone,
and given how slow my NNTP connection is it would have taken gnus nearly 12
hours to read news.lists.filters alone, much less alt.nocem.misc and the other
NoCeM groups. It seems like this could be fixed with a bit of elisp - if NoCeM
is creating its active file then it should consider all NoCeM messages as
"read" so that gnus doesn't spend hours and hours reading NoCeM messages during
gnus' first invocation on a new server. 

scott

--
J. Scott Hofmann
shofmann@intertv.com

Re: Some thoughts on NoCeM and switching servers

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Scott Hofmann <shofmann@intertv.com> writes:

> The first problem I had was in logging into the NNTP server. It's a
> secure server that requires a login and password, so I initiallly
> set nntp-authinfo-function to nntp-send-nosy-authinfo. When I ran
> gnus, it did stuff in a backwards order: it connected to the NNTP
> server, and then asked for the login information.

That's what's supposed to happen -- the server asks for authinfo by
issuing a "480" response, and Gnus is supposed to reply to that.  But
it sounds like there's a bug there somewhere, since it hangs.  Could
you `(setq debug-on-quit t)' and `C-g' when it starts spinning?  Send
me the resulting backtrace.

> The second problem was with NoCeM. When there is no NoCeM/active
> file, it would be nice if NoCeM behaved as if gnus-nocem-expiry-wait
> was set to 0 - on my new NNTP server there were over 10,000 unread
> messages in news.lists.filters alone, and given how slow my NNTP
> connection is it would have taken gnus nearly 12 hours to read
> news.lists.filters alone, much less alt.nocem.misc and the other
> NoCeM groups. It seems like this could be fixed with a bit of elisp
> - if NoCeM is creating its active file then it should consider all
> NoCeM messages as "read" so that gnus doesn't spend hours and hours
> reading NoCeM messages during gnus' first invocation on a new
> server.

But that might be what some people would want -- fetch all the NoCeM
messages so that all spam would be NoCeM'ed out.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@ifi.uio.no * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

Re: Some thoughts on NoCeM and switching servers

[Don Croyle]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Scott Hofmann <shofmann@intertv.com> writes:

> > - if NoCeM is creating its active file then it should consider all
> > NoCeM messages as "read" so that gnus doesn't spend hours and hours
> > reading NoCeM messages during gnus' first invocation on a new
> > server.
> 
> But that might be what some people would want -- fetch all the NoCeM
> messages so that all spam would be NoCeM'ed out.

Perhaps Gnus could ask how many NoCeM messages to read like it does
when opening a large group?  It'd also be nice if it differentiated
between types of NoCeM's so that someone could accept, for example,
Chris Lewis's anti-spam NoCeM's and ignore the anti-troll ones.

Largely moot to me now, since I'm running NoCeM on spool, but I tried
using gnus-nocem once and gave up when my connection died after 29
hours.
-- 
I've always wanted to be a dilettante, but I've never quite been ready
to make the commitment.

Re: Some thoughts on NoCeM and switching servers

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Don Croyle <croyle@gelemna.ft-wayne.in.us> writes:

> It'd also be nice if it differentiated between types of NoCeM's so
> that someone could accept, for example, Chris Lewis's anti-spam
> NoCeM's and ignore the anti-troll ones.

I've now added this to the todo list.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen