Getting News with Leafnode

For News, I use leafnode. It installed very easily compared with suck and the gnus-based stuff, both of which I tried unsuccessfully before trying leafnode.

Installation

The only installation problem I hit was failing to tell the configuration file what my password on my isp was. I didn't need this to read news, but it silently refused to post any messages for me until I gave it the password.

Operational problems

Sometimes the /usr/lib/leafnode/groupinfo file gets partially clobbered. (For instance, if the partition gets full.) I used to remove the file manually, but this causes problems; I now know that the kosher way to do this is to run "fetch -f", which forces a rebuild.
If your system runs out of memory, fetch may react by exiting with a segmentation fault, instead of downloading the news. I've added more swap space to my system to deal with this.
If you have a backup of your news spool directory, or you find the article you know is there but didn't tick or save by running grep on the directory, you will find that texpire will stop expiring your news, because by default it works off the last access time. Recent versions of leafnode have a -f option to texpire, which is what I use now.
If you get behind on reading news, you may find that leafnode has decided that the groups you aren't reading aren't interesting any more, and deleted them from the interesting.groups directory. I wrote a script to touch files for all the groups that are subscribed in my .newsrc file. (touchnews.sh)
If your connection is interrupted while fetchnews is getting the news, sometimes the lockfile is still there, and the next time you dial up, fetchnews doesn't download any news. I now have this line:
rm -f /var/lock/news/fetch.lck
in my /etc/ppp/ip-down.local file.

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Last modified: Mon Dec 27 12:05:41 EST 1999

Last modified: 2002-06-29 11:12, 2007
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