Prevent "LIST ACTIVE group" for specific nntp servers?

Prevent "LIST ACTIVE group" for specific nntp servers?

[Bruno Hertz]

Hi folks

my ISP just moved their news feed, now apparently using Chiparus for
load balancing. As it happens, article numbers now come out wrong when
Gnus issues "LIST ACTIVE group" during updates on that server. I
informed them, but it's not clear yet whether it's a misconfiguration
issue or a bug.

Anyway, I'd like to prevent LIST ACTIVE for groups on that server and
rather have Gnus step into the group (via GROUP apparently) for
gathering article counts, at least until that issue is fixed. So
anybody knows if and how this can be achieved?

Thanks a lot, Bruno.

Re: Prevent "LIST ACTIVE group" for specific nntp servers?

[Bruno Hertz]

"Bruno Hertz" <brrhtz@y4h00d0td3.invalid> writes:

> Hi folks
>
> my ISP just moved their news feed, now apparently using Chiparus for
> load balancing. As it happens, article numbers now come out wrong when
> Gnus issues "LIST ACTIVE group" during updates on that server. I
> informed them, but it's not clear yet whether it's a misconfiguration
> issue or a bug.
>
> Anyway, I'd like to prevent LIST ACTIVE for groups on that server and
> rather have Gnus step into the group (via GROUP apparently) for
> gathering article counts, at least until that issue is fixed. So
> anybody knows if and how this can be achieved?
>
> Thanks a lot, Bruno.

OK, fixed this thanks to groups.google.com.

To restate the problem, on my server LIST ACTIVE group gives a wrong
message range. Example telnet session:

 # telnet news.myisp.com 119
 Trying 192.168.0.100...
 Connected to news.myisp.com.
 Escape character is '^]'.
 200 news.myisp.com
 mode reader
 200 Sure!
 list active comp.unix.solaris
 215 Active file follows
 comp.unix.solaris 0000358796 0000350838 y
 .
 group comp.unix.solaris
 211 6088 351204 359007 comp.unix.solaris
 quit
 205 Exit articles 0, bytes 0, groups 1, posts 0, postbytes 0
 Connection closed by foreign host.

Here, 'list active comp.unix.solaris' gives a wrong message range of
350838 to 358796, while the 'group' command gives the correct 351204
to 359007 range. Presumably a server misconfiguration.

Now, to prevent Gnus from using LIST ACTIVE and rather use GROUP
instead, one has to set nntp-server-list-active-group to nil (default
is 'try). Since this is a 'server slot variable', as Lars elsewhere
states, one should put it into the server definition given in either
gnus-select-method or gnus-secondary-select-methods in your .gnus
file.

E.g. my gnus-secondary-select-methods now contains the following entry
   (nntp "news.myisp.com"
     (nntp-server-list-active-group nil))
and this just works. On my other native servers, 'LIST ACTIVE' is
still used, and only for that specific server it's turned off.

One issue I observed though is that Gnus will use GROUP also on
foreign servers with this setting. Up to now, I had several gmane
groups just subscribed as foreign groups. So to still use 'LIST
ACTIVE' on them, I had to turn gmane native by putting it into my
gnus-secondary-select-methods. With this final tweak, everything's
fine now.

Thanks, Bruno.