Rocksolid Light 0.6.5d has been applied to rslight.i2p as an upgrade. I'm running this on two test sites also.

Barring any major issues, I'll put a download online soon.

To upgrade, extract the .tgz file to a temporary location, then execute the <platform>-upgrade.sh file for your platform (as root).

This will overwrite everything in your web accessible directories except 'common', and will overwrite the scripts in <$config_dir>/scripts/

Distribution config files will be added to your config directory ending in .dist. Please check these for any additions that need to be copied to your current config files.

Once done, kill your nntp server (for example):
ps aux | grep nntp
www-data 18060 23.3 1.0 207924 10544 ? Ss May16 1297:33 php /etc/rslight/scripts/nntp.php
kill 18060

then allow it to restart when cron.php runs next. You may also just reboot if you wish. I plan to have an easier way to do this in a future release.

Note: Future upgrades may overwrite files in <$webroot>/common/, so if you have a custom style.css, header.php or images, copy them to mods/ or mods/images so they continue to be used.

Retro Guy
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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
news.novabbs.com

Minor changes and bug fixes in 0.6.5d include:

Fixed sending group descriptions to a newsreader whether they come from your local groups.txt file or upstream server, and make sure they are formatted properly for all currently tested newsreaders.

Changed local descriptions display to use your local groups.txt file if descriptions exist there, then only from upstream. This allows customization of descriptions locally, and not propagating them.

Allow groups.txt to be space or tab separated so pasting a file including either will work.

Fixed Xref header in local spool files as some newsreaders (Pan) use this header to then retrieve the message.

Added STAT command to nntp server, and modified spoolnews.php to use stat to check for duplicate article before pulling it. This reduces bandwidth use substantially if changing upstream news servers as rslight used to pull the entire article, then just discard it.

Also fixed another area of duplicate checking to make sure it is group specific, allowing for crossposted articles.

Fixed a bug where both overboard.php and result.php were overwriting a variable from config ($maxarticles). This didn't really cause a problem, but isn't good practice.

Added the ability to bind nntp server to all networks instead of just one address.

Added the ability to auto create accounts just by using them.

Added feature to return to group automatically after posting, without any need to click anything. Thanks to the "def" admin for this :)

Fixed search, finally!!!

Removed some unused code from a couple of files.

Minor bug fixes.

Retro Guy

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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
news.novabbs.com

Still just touching up a few things:

Changed the delimiter in <section>-overview files to TAB. <group>-overview files already do, now all overview files do. 0.6.5x will continue to read the files with either delimiter, so already created lines still work.

I will add the icon for Latest (left of group names) to be checked in mods/images so it is not overwritten on upgrade.

That's it right now. Just did a full update on rslight.i2p (the OS) and applied the very latest rslight code after that. Also, made sure my i2p router is up to date.

Retro Guy

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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
www.novabbs.com

rslight nntp server working fine with Pan (attached pic)

Added the port number to the filename where remote server pointers are stored. This is necessary mainly for i2p users as changing from one nntp server to another in i2p will probably still have the same hostname (the hostname of your router). This way it knows it's a different server.

Improved the self-identification of rslight sites, which is only used internally for some features. Spoofing would have been very simple, now it's quite a bit harder to do so (anything is possible).

Improved logging for spoolnews to help in troubleshooting, and force the script to exit much earlier if unable to connect to remote server.

Cleaned up spoolnews lock files to not allow send.php to run while pulling articles. I've been trying to duplicate the issue def is having, and cleaning up what I can think of. I haven't been able to duplicate the issue, but fixing this one, and improving troubleshooting are the result of this.

I may consider timing the connection to the remote server, and if it takes longer than 'x', assume we're on a slow network and taking a few extra steps to make sure we get/send as necessary. I think this might be better than asking an admin to set a variable to tell us, so maybe just test and see. I don't want to take these extra steps on clearnet, as it's just a waste of processing and time if not necessary.

Retro Guy

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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
www.novabbs.com

In trying to duplicate the problem on def2, I found a bug that MIGHT be the
issue. I was able to create posts that never showed up anywhere, or
sometimes in rocksolid.spam.

I see what was happening, and have made a fix in nntp.php.

If all seems ok, I'll have 0.6.5d online very soon.

Retro Guy

Just went through this upgrade step by step, and basically it all worked out well. The backups were not needed :-).
Just one thing noteworthy: some threads that used to be intact are fragmented now. So I guess the order of retrieval is also important to rslight.
I have not yet emptied the spool completely, but might do that as a next step (or not, I can live with some broken threads).

so far so good.

cheers

trw

that is amazing, selfhealing, huh ?

could you make an option to update from several different news servers ? it would be nice to check and connect to several sources in order to make the whole network more stable and fault tolerant.

cheers

trw

the overboard has some problem, it runs partly and fails with a 500 to the client.
where does rslight log such things ?

cheers

trw

for the groups programming and social. both display "latest messages", so the titles, but the actual messages cannot be accessed.
guess i should just empty the spool and retransmit everything at this point ?
interestingly, the overboard breaks exactly when it comes to the messages present before i zeroed all the watermarks. i guess something is not aligned here between rslight and the news server.

Anonymous wrote:

> for the groups programming and social. both display "latest messages", so the titles, but the actual messages cannot be accessed.
> guess i should just empty the spool and retransmit everything at this point ?
> interestingly, the overboard breaks exactly when it comes to the messages present before i zeroed all the watermarks. i guess something is not aligned here between rslight and the news server.

That's what I would do. I'd stop cron.php first, make sure spoolnews.php isn't running (has finished running), then delete the entire spool, then reenable cron.

I'll address your other posts later. I have to go to work and manage a bunch of people that outrank me in the company, which makes it a bit difficult to get them to do things properly. I promise to not fire any of them, though it's tempting :)

I'll bbl.

Retro Guy

--
Posted on: Rocksolid Light
www.novabbs.com

Anonymous wrote:

> could you make an option to update from several different news servers ? it would be nice to check and connect to several sources in order to make the whole network more stable and fault tolerant.

I've been considering that. Now that I check for existing articles in a way that uses very little bandwidth (starting 0.6.5d), it shouldn't be a waste of resources.

I could rotate through upstream servers, or check them all each time. Also, need to consider posting (sending articles upstream), which server? I'll have to find a good balanced way to do that.

I still have more tweaks and bug fixes to work on, but this will be one of my future mods.

Retro Guy

--
Posted on: Rocksolid Light
www.novabbs.com

Anonymous wrote:

> the overboard has some problem, it runs partly and fails with a 500 to the client.
> where does rslight log such things ?

The overboard does not log right now. I'll be adding more logging to things in future releases. Right now, it's just some of the stuff in /etc/rslight/scripts that logs. Logs are kept in /var/spool/rslight/log

I'm sure the problem is it is hanging on one messages. Since there is no footer, the script is never completing so it times out. I suspect than an incomplete messasge may not end in a dot(.) if never fully transferred and the script is stuck in a loop. I plan to improve overboard.php to not let this happen in the next release, and I've not actually seen it happen on any of my sites, I just suspect that may be it as I think the code would choke on such a message.

Let's see what completely rebuilding the spool does.

Retro Guy

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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
www.novabbs.com

the overboard starts working first, than the board indeces (or maybe in parallel). the main index remains empty yet.

>I could rotate through upstream servers, or check them all each time. Also, need to consider posting (sending articles upstream), which server? I'll have to find a good balanced way to do that.

either you do random order (i would find that nicest), or you might define a fixed one as well.
for posting you could do one main server (as a default), and the others as fallbacks.
i am good at planning other peoples time, huh ? :-)

let's see what happens. before i did, i checked the files under "/log/" and discovered that there seems to be a size limit on the messages (1 000 000 bytes :-).
Where can I change that ?

main index is working now, but programming and social are still out of it.
also a problem to access some other messages (like http://z5bqfv5v75kxy7pj.onion/rocksolid/article-flat.php?id=104&group=rocksolid.nodes.announce#104 ).

and done, all seems to be back to normal, and overboard is working.
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Posted on def2
z5bqfv5v75kxy7pj.onion

and some old messages begin to show up in programming, i get a lot of these:

==> ./log/nntp.log <==
socket_read() failed: reason: Connection reset by peer
socket_read() failed: reason: Connection reset by peer

the articles are in the spool, but rslight just does not show them.

Anonymous wrote:

> main index is working now, but programming and social are still out of it.
> also a problem to access some other messages (like http://z5bqfv5v75kxy7pj.onion/rocksolid/article-flat.php?id=104&group=rocksolid.nodes.announce#104 ).

I believe I have duplicated the problem on a test site. This test site also connects to it's upstream server via i2p.

I'll be working on it on this site trying to determine what's causing the problem, but currently r.s.programming is also broken on the test site. This is a good thing, it allows me to see the problem in action locally.

I'll get back with info once I do some troubleshooting, but it may take a couple of days.

Retro Guy

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Posted on: rslight Debian test site
192.168.0.220

Retro Guy wrote:

> Anonymous wrote:

>> main index is working now, but programming and social are still out of it.
>> also a problem to access some other messages (like http://z5bqfv5v75kxy7pj.onion/rocksolid/article-flat.php?id=104&group=rocksolid.nodes.announce#104 ).

> I believe I have duplicated the problem on a test site. This test site also connects to it's upstream server via i2p.

> I'll be working on it on this site trying to determine what's causing the problem, but currently r.s.programming is also broken on the test site. This is a good thing, it allows me to see the problem in action locally.

> I'll get back with info once I do some troubleshooting, but it may take a couple of days.

I'm currently rebuilding the spool with a modified spoolnews.php that will break out of the download loop and unlink the local file if connection is lost to upstream server. I've also added a log entry if this happens.

I'll continue testing to see if this is hopefully the problem.

Retro Guy

--
Posted on: Rocksolid Light
www.novabbs.com

articles from social and programming cannot be found.
think i will just for debugging purposes hook the nntp server of def2 to my own.

i just had to change one article manually, because the character ² (square) was included.
this is the error message from spoolnews:

May 29 14:05:26 rocksolid Failed to POST: a8c8ed: 441 Invalid syntax encountered in Subject: header field body (unexpected byte or empty content line)
do yo know if that is part of the spec for news ? or is it something specific to rslight ?

cheers

trw