[Gnus-5.5] Changing news server -- how well does it work?

[Gnus-5.5] Changing news server -- how well does it work?

[Mark Borges]

My current newsfeed (news.colorado.edu) has become extremely flaky,
and I would like to move to an alternate as my primary server. I've
read through the `Changing Servers' node on the info pages, and am
very tempted to switch servers using gnus-change-server().

Does this work reasonably well, or will I find some unexpected and/or
undocumented surprises? In particular, I'm curious how the transition
will handle:

  (1) cached news articles. I have saved many old articles to local
      disk, and wonder if I'll continue to have access to them (with
      their old article numbers) via the Gnus interface.
  (2) nonexistent newsgroups. The current server subscribes to nearly
      everything under the sun, including the clari.* hierarchy. The
      alternate, is much more restrictive in what it offers (but it's
      much faster for the more common newsgroups I'm interested in
      following).

Any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated.

My current setup as reported by gnus-bug() is,

Gnus v5.5; nntp 5.0; nnml 1.0; nnmh 1.0; nndir 1.0
XEmacs 20.4 "Emerald" [Lucid] (sparc-sun-solaris2.5) of Tue Mar 24 1998 on gill
200 boulder InterNetNews NNRP server INN 1.4unoff2 7-Aug-95 ready (posting ok).

------------------ Environment follows ------------------
[ remainder elided, supplied on request ]


and the new (alternate) news server is running
200 news.boulder.noaa.gov InterNetNews NNRP server INN 1.7.2 08-Dec-1997 ready (posting ok).

-- 
  -mb-

Re: [Gnus-5.5] Changing news server -- how well does it work?

[Dan Christensen]

Mark Borges <mdb@cdc.noaa.gov> writes:
> My current newsfeed (news.colorado.edu) has become extremely flaky,
> and I would like to move to an alternate as my primary server. I've
> read through the `Changing Servers' node on the info pages, and am
> very tempted to switch servers using gnus-change-server().
> 
> Does this work reasonably well, or will I find some unexpected and/or
> undocumented surprises? In particular, I'm curious how the transition
> will handle:

I couldn't get gnus-change-server to work for me.  I got lots of
errors involving sorting nil lists.  You should be sure to back
up everything before trying this.

>   (1) cached news articles.

Since the article numbers at the new server will be unrelated to
those at the old server, gnus has no easy way to handle cached
articles.  So it simply ignores them.  

>   (2) nonexistent newsgroups. 

I'm not sure if this causes a problem.

Dan

-- 
Dan Christensen
jdc@math.jhu.edu

Re: [Gnus-5.5] Changing news server -- how well does it work?

[Mark Borges]

>> On 23 Apr 1998 12:23:01 -0600,
>> Mark Borges(mb) wrote:
mb> My current newsfeed (news.colorado.edu) has become extremely flaky,
mb> and I would like to move to an alternate as my primary server. I've
mb> read through the `Changing Servers' node on the info pages, and am
mb> very tempted to switch servers using gnus-change-server().

mb> Does this work reasonably well, or will I find some unexpected and/or
mb> undocumented surprises? In particular, I'm curious how the transition
mb> will handle:

mb>   (1) cached news articles. I have saved many old articles to local
mb>       disk, and wonder if I'll continue to have access to them (with
mb>       their old article numbers) via the Gnus interface.

Now that I've switched (and hand-edited the .eld file to preserve my
mailfolder ticks) I've run into a problem -- it seems that some of the 
articles in my cache folder have article numbers larger than those for 
the same group in the new server. Consequently, I think this is
confusing Gnus such that the *Group* buffer never shows any new
articles as arriving (when in fact there are). 

Is there a simple way to resequence one's cached article numbers to
start at a lower number?

I tried using gnus-cache-generate-active(), but you don't want to know 
how much fun that was to recover from (somehow my top level
~/Mail/active file got wiped out). So, before I try shoot myself in
the foot again, I thought I'd ask if others have run into this
problem, and, if so, what the solution was.

Thanks.

-- 
  -mb-

Re: [Gnus-5.5] Changing news server -- how well does it work?

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Mark Borges <mdb@cdc.noaa.gov> writes:

> Is there a simple way to resequence one's cached article numbers to
> start at a lower number?

I don't think so.

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