Re: Can Gnus handle multiple ISPs?

Re: Can Gnus handle multiple ISPs?

[Reiner Steib]

On Sat, May 25 2002, Jens Schmidt wrote:

> I have two different ISPs A and B and I want to access them with
> only one Gnus (i.e., with only one .newsrc.eld etc.) as follows:
>
> - completely disconnected from A and B
> - connected to A, disconnected from B
> - connected to B, disconnected from A
[...]
> Is that currently possible?  Any plans to implement something
> like that?  Any alternative approaches?

Set up a simple local news on your machine (leafnode for Unix/Linux or
Hamster for Windows) and let them fetch from both, ISP-A and ISP-B. At
least leafnode just skips servers that it's not allowed to access
(trying to connected to server ISP-A while connected to ISP-B). Dunno
about Hamster. Within Gnus, you only will use localhost as the server
in gnus-select-method.

Other method are difficult, because Gnus (and every other User-Agent,
AFAIK) looks at/stores the article numbers and not at the unique
Message-Id (an article has different numbers on different servers).

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo--- PGP key available via WWW   http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: Can Gnus handle multiple ISPs?

[Simon Josefsson]

Jens.Schmidt27@epost.de (Jens Schmidt) writes:

> Hi.
>
> I have two different ISPs A and B and I want to access them with
> only one Gnus (i.e., with only one .newsrc.eld etc.) as follows:
>
> - completely disconnected from A and B
> - connected to A, disconnected from B
> - connected to B, disconnected from A
>
> where "disconnected" means "disconnected and agentized".
>
> Is that currently possible?  Any plans to implement something
> like that?  Any alternative approaches?

Add both servers in g-s-s-m and frob the connectedness in the server
buffer.

Re: Can Gnus handle multiple ISPs?

[Simon Josefsson]

Jens.Schmidt27@epost.de (Jens Schmidt) writes:

> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> wrote:
>> Add both servers in g-s-s-m and frob the connectedness in the server
>> buffer.
>
> But that does not give me offline reading of articles for the
> disconnected servers, right?

If you use the Agent and downloads messages before disconnecting; yes,
it would.

Re: Can Gnus handle multiple ISPs?

[Jens Schmidt]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

> Jens.Schmidt27@epost.de (Jens Schmidt) writes:
> 
> > Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> wrote:
> >> Add both servers in g-s-s-m and frob the connectedness in the server
> >> buffer.
> >
> > But that does not give me offline reading of articles for the
> > disconnected servers, right?
> 
> If you use the Agent and downloads messages before disconnecting; yes,
> it would.

Ok, then let me fill in the details to see whether the following
scenario is correct:

o I keep servers for ISP A and ISP B in g-s-s-m and agentize the
  groups belonging to both of them.

o I connect to, say, ISP A and start Gnus plugged.  Since I am
  not connected to ISP B I will have wait for the timeout to kick
  in to get my Group-buffer (on my NT box I haven't been
  successfull with C-g to cancel the connection process for an
  absent server).  That's, um, a little bit annoying.

o I do a J s and get the articles saved for ISP A.

o I close ISP A in the server buffer, disconnect from ISP A and
  connect to ISP B, follwed by "O" in the server buffer to force
  an open for the server of ISP B.

o (Note that I haven't unplugged the agent so far.)  Now, I can
  automagically access the groups from ISP A through the agent?!
  I thought the agent "redirects" group access in unplugged mode
  only?  Or do I have to disconnect from ISP B, too, and unplug
  Gnus to access all articles?  That would be even more annoying
  in my case, since im connected to ISP B most of the time, anyway.

Thanks for your help,

Jens

Re: Can Gnus handle multiple ISPs?

[Kai Großjohann]

Jens.Schmidt27@epost.de (Jens Schmidt) writes:

> o I connect to, say, ISP A and start Gnus plugged.  Since I am
>   not connected to ISP B I will have wait for the timeout to kick
>   in to get my Group-buffer (on my NT box I haven't been
>   successfull with C-g to cancel the connection process for an
>   absent server).  That's, um, a little bit annoying.

You could start Gnus unplugged.  Then plug, and fetch the groups from
the servers you can reach.

kai
-- 
Silence is foo!

Re: Can Gnus handle multiple ISPs?

[Paul Jarc]

Bob Babcock <wssddc@gis.net> wrote:
>> Why not just use a secondary or foreign server?
>
> I couldn't tell from the info files what happens if you read the same
> newsgroup from different servers.

They're kept completely separate.  Reading an article on one server
does not cause the article to be marked as read on the other.

> Separating the setup as much as possible seems to me to be the most
> natural way to handle multiple servers.

Right.  Toggling the definition of gnus-select-method makes them less
separate than having one as the primary and the other as secondary or
foreign (or both secondary or foreign).  I wouldn't be at all
surprised if toggling the definition of gnus-select-method made
something break, especially if the servers' article numbers aren't
synchronized.


paul

Re: Can Gnus handle multiple ISPs?

[Bob Babcock]

> I wouldn't be at all surprised if toggling the definition of
> gnus-select-method made something break, especially if the servers' article
> numbers aren't synchronized.

It seems pretty robust; I've been using this method for handling multiple
servers for a while without problems.  But perhaps I'm asking for trouble by
not using gnus the way the authors expect.

I also change gnus-select-method to deal with my isp's 6 synchronized news
servers when some of them are down or overloaded.  Here I want articles
marked as read on one server to be marked on all the others, so I change
gnus-select-method after .newsrc-servername has been read.  Amazingly I seem
to be able to mostly get away with doing this.  I do get "wrong type
argument: processp, nil" errors when a server rejects a connection.  Someday
I'll figure out how to use the elisp debugger and see where these come from.

Re: Can Gnus handle multiple ISPs?

[Jens Schmidt]

Thanks to all posters for their advice.

I should have added that the information I get from ISP A and ISP
B is disjoint: I get my office mail via IMAP from ISP A, my
private mail via POP from ISP B (and probably in future my news
from ISP C because the news server at our office sucks and I do not
want use Google when there is Gnus).

Is that scenario so unusual that nobody stumbled across it in the
past?

Jens