#24 Article numbers got huge

[Bob Weissman]

A week or two ago, trn (version 4.0 test 76) article
numbers went crazy.

My initial newsgroup selector looks like this:

Newsgroups ~75 groups

a 537862295 rec.scuba.equipment
b 537862295 rec.scuba.locations
d 537862295 soc.women
e 537862295 soc.men
f 537862295 soc.sexuality.general
g 284 fido7.su.cars.bmw
i 9 wiz.bmw
j 4 comp.os.ms-windows.apps.financial
l 29 misc.invest.financial-plan
o 4335 rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
r 14 alt.comp.software.financial.quicken
s 23 rec.audio.high-end
t 162 alt.autos.bmw
u 3 alt.auto.bmw
...

The top 5 newsgroups have these huge numbers, but all
other newsgroups work perfectly, as before.

So I put some "decoy" newsgroups, which I never read,
at the top of my .newsrc, which now looks like this:

rec.scuba.equipment: 1-134876367
rec.scuba.locations: 1-134876367
soc.women: 1-134876367
soc.men: 1-134876367
soc.sexuality.general: 1-134876367
fido7.su.cars.bmw: 1-28198
wiz.bmw: 1-2236
alt.comp.software.financial: 1-3576
comp.os.ms-windows.apps.financial: 1-3659
misc.invest.financial-plan: 1-16163
rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated: 1-110521
news.software.readers: 1-144753
alt.comp.software.financial.quicken: 1-105143
rec.audio.high-end: 1-71971
alt.autos.bmw: 1-227201
alt.auto.bmw: 1-1917
...

Does anyone know what's happened here, and how to
fix it? I rebuilt trn (on FreeBSD) from source but it didn't
help.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Logged In: NO

The same thing has happened to me. I'm also on FreeBSD, but
I can't find any specific file that changed at about the time
the change happened, that looks related anyway. I've also
recompiled with no effect. (I get the huge numbers with every
group, not just the top 5.)

I'm on FreeBSD 4.9, connecting to a Typhoon 2.1.1.363 nntp
server which does respond with correct information to a
GROUP command.

I have tried to make trn tell me what it is actually seeing with
the GROUP command results but I don't think my C is good
enough; I'll keep playing with it, though.

felan@best.com

[Albert Bertram]

Logged In: YES
user_id=1272532

I had the same problems with trn on both Solaris and Linux.
When I and my coworker investigated this problem, we found
that trn was requesting "XTHREAD DBINIT" from the nntp
server. The nntp server responded by closing the
connection, and then trn did bad things like corrupt the
.newsrc.

What seems to work for me was to comment out the line
containing:

#define SUPPORT_XTHREAD

from config.h after I ran Configure, but before I ran make.
I believe that I was also connecting to a Typhoon server,
though I don't know the version off the top of my head.