I noticed something unusual on the NNTP servers for news.novabbs.org
and news.i2pn2.org. I compared the number of messages listed in the web
portal to the number available via the NNTP servers. There appears to
be a large discrepancy between the displayed message counts and the
spool counts in the servers. The total messages per group shown in the
portal is far greater than the total messages available via NNTP.

I used telnet to check the message numbering of group
rocksolid.shared.encryption on news.novabbs.org:

200 rocksolid2 InterNetNews NNRP server INN 2.7.1 ready (no posting)
group rocksolid.shared.encryption
211 1 179 214 rocksolid.shared.encryption
stat 214
223 214 <38943a094fb9ad89@novabbs.com> status
next
421 No next article to retrieve
last
422 No previous article to retrieve
stat 1
423 No such article number 1
stat 179
423 No such article number 179
stat 180
423 No such article number 180
stat 213
423 No such article number 213
stat 212
423 No such article number 212
quit
205 Bye!
Connection closed by foreign host.

* only one article is available here, but on novabbs.org the interface
shows 137 messages. I recall a prior install last year having most of
them. If you look on my test interface on my portal, only 4 messages
have synced. But if you look at your portal it lists 137 messages.

Then I tried at news.i2pn2.org with telnet:

200 i2pn2.org InterNetNews NNRP server INN 2.7.1 ready (no posting)
group rocksolid.shared.encryption
211 4 170 173 rocksolid.shared.encryption
stat 173
223 173 <38943a094fb9ad89@novabbs.com> status
stat 172
223 172 <9758f8fa4fb9ad89@novabbs.com> status
stat 171
223 171 <58b4ebf8c66032ff@novabbs.org> status
stat 170
223 170 <e7b7f47341af300dffae344fd4df4d77@news.novabbs.org> status

* only 4 articles show available here, but on novabbs.org the web
interface shows 137 messages.

I checked rocksolid.shared.general via telnet:

200 rocksolid2 InterNetNews NNRP server INN 2.7.1 ready (no posting)
group rocksolid.shared.general
211 33 761 843 rocksolid.shared.general
stat 33
423 No such article number 33
stat 761
223 761 <tue456$25e3$1@news.cyber23.de> status
stat 843
223 843 <f8088eea3cdb9d5b8829bde07547fc69$1@news.novabbs.org> status
stat 761
223 761 <tue456$25e3$1@news.cyber23.de> status
last
422 No previous article to retrieve
next
223 765 <tvin6a$gum$1@novabbs.org> Article retrieved; request text
separately
next
223 767 <c32c018aab65d37d60502e29442f86c6@dizum.com> Article retrieved;
request text separately
quit
205 Bye!
Connection closed by foreign host.

* only 82 articles seem to be available here, but on novabbs.org the
interface shows 662 messages. I did not stat all 82, but I suspect in
that span more are possibly missing as my side only syncs 31 messages
of the group.

I suspect the INN servers have munged some indexes? If so it looked
like sync was not happening with these groups, as compared to which
messages are available in the novabbs rslight web portal. I do recall
in my last running install, all of these message numberings on my peer
more or less matched novabbs.org. I'm certain that some months ago the
numberings for some of the groups were dead on the same when comparing
my portal to the novabbs.org portal.

On Fri, 22 Dec 2023 09:01:38 -0600, SugarBug wrote:

> I noticed something unusual on the NNTP servers for news.novabbs.org
> and news.i2pn2.org. I compared the number of messages listed in the web
> portal to the number available via the NNTP servers. There appears to
> be a large discrepancy between the displayed message counts and the
> spool counts in the servers. The total messages per group shown in the
> portal is far greater than the total messages available via NNTP.

I moved rocksolid.* from tradspool to cnfs a few weeks ago on both servers.

I had thought that the tradspool articles would still be available, but
they are not. This is something I also noticed.

My plan was (is) to wipe the tradspool and rebuild the overview for both
servers, but this takes a long time, so I plan to do it at the weekend when
less people are trying to use it.

I was a bit surprised that chaning from tradspool to cnfs did that, but it
did it with every hierarchy I changed, which is all of them at one point in
the past.