Re: UQWK: Failure when News server down

From: Allen Scott-Thoennes (sthoenna@efn.org)
Date: Tue, 02 Sep 1997 17:55:32 -0700

In article <l7wC0clh5DCf092yn@interlog.com>,
cordahi@interlog.com (George Cordahi) wrote:
>
>Hi friends:
>
>I have the following problem. The news server at my ISP (interlog.com) has
>been intermittently, but too frequently down in the last few days and
>weeks.
>
>When the news server is down, mail cannot be received, or sent even
>though I have the news option set as OFF.
>What happens is that the process hangs as the connnection to the news
>server times out.
>
>The command line I use to send out replies is:
> uqwk -m -n +L -RREPLIES
>
>The flags have the following meanings:
> -m Don't process mail (ie. new mail)
> -n Don't process news (ie. new news)
> +L Use Soup format
> -R Process replies in file REPLIES
>
>It is puzzling that uqwk would poll the news server even when it is not set
>to do anything with it. Is this how uqwk was designed, or is it a flawed
>configuration at the ISP. ?
>
>Any ways around this ?
>
>gc
>
>[I am posting a uqwk question to this newsgroup because I understand many
>yarn'ers also use uqwk.]

Hmm...I posted the following to the list pretty recently, but as I saw a
"me too" to this message, I guess I'll post it again:

In article <XmjqzgzkguJI092yn@efn.org>,
sthoenna@efn.org (Allen Scott-Thoennes) wrote:

Yes, but it is an intentional foible! First of all, uqwk doesn't
readily know whether you are doing only mail replies, and while it
would be fairly easy to determine this up front for SOUP, uqwk handles
two other formats also. Uqwk (correctly in my opinion) takes the
conservative approach of making sure it can open the newsserver first
rather than blowing up on the first news post, leaving the whole replies
file only partially processed.

The other less obvious gotcha is that even mail-only reply packets could
contain To: UQWK messages telling it to subscribe to a newsgroup, for
which it needs the nntpserver to validate the group name.

That said, there are two workarouds...

First, before running uqwk set the NNTPSERVER var to a public server
such as news.uni-stuttgart.de.

Or compile the non-nntp flavor of uqwk (source at ftp.gte.com) which
doesn't suffer from this problem.