4th dimensional transition
Posted by Holger Schauer in
Emacs
Monday, November 2. 2009
I'm a long standing user of Gnus, the Emacs mail and news reader (news as in usenet for those geeks young enough to not have used it in the 90s). I've been using Gnus in various settings whereas the latest configuration was to talk to a local leafnode NNTP server on my workstation. This was all fine and dandy and also survived several distribution level upgrades of the linux installation running on the system. However, some time ago, I bought new hardware and opted for a completely new installation. Of course, I backed up my leafnode and gnus configuration and restored it once the system was running.
Which was when the trouble started. I ran into the problem that I couldn't see any articles on my local leafnode, although I could retrieve them with other newsreaders just fine. I then opted to go and do a gnus-cache-generate-nov-databases. This turned out to be a pretty bad idea -- as a result I couldn't retrieve my mail any longer. After digging quite a lot around, it occured to me that the active file might have a problem. Indeed, it was empty. Fortunately, I could restore that quite easily, so I could access my mail again. Otherwise, however, I had gained nothing: still no news wasn't so good news. Next try: see if the server buffer tells me anything new. It did: the connection to my leafnode was open and I could even access the new messages on it this way. But this didn't have any effect on my normal group buffer.
Having learned to look around for the active file the hard way made me look into all kind of directions. Sometime in the past, I've used the agent-mode of gnus which resulted in a larger subdirectory tree in my News directory. And where which information was stored in the first place seems to have changed over time (or modifications I might to my configuration), too, so my News directory had lots of old files. After several tries and errors, I finally moved the News/cache directory out of the way and finally started to see new articles again. So, I'm now back to reading usenet.
ObTitle: Porcupine Tree, "On the sunday of life"
Which was when the trouble started. I ran into the problem that I couldn't see any articles on my local leafnode, although I could retrieve them with other newsreaders just fine. I then opted to go and do a gnus-cache-generate-nov-databases. This turned out to be a pretty bad idea -- as a result I couldn't retrieve my mail any longer. After digging quite a lot around, it occured to me that the active file might have a problem. Indeed, it was empty. Fortunately, I could restore that quite easily, so I could access my mail again. Otherwise, however, I had gained nothing: still no news wasn't so good news. Next try: see if the server buffer tells me anything new. It did: the connection to my leafnode was open and I could even access the new messages on it this way. But this didn't have any effect on my normal group buffer.
Having learned to look around for the active file the hard way made me look into all kind of directions. Sometime in the past, I've used the agent-mode of gnus which resulted in a larger subdirectory tree in my News directory. And where which information was stored in the first place seems to have changed over time (or modifications I might to my configuration), too, so my News directory had lots of old files. After several tries and errors, I finally moved the News/cache directory out of the way and finally started to see new articles again. So, I'm now back to reading usenet.
ObTitle: Porcupine Tree, "On the sunday of life"
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