gnus: Unavailable Servers
6.1.7 Unavailable Servers
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If a server seems to be unreachable, Gnus will mark that server as
‘denied’. That means that any subsequent attempt to make contact with
that server will just be ignored. “It can’t be opened,” Gnus will tell
you, without making the least effort to see whether that is actually the
case or not.
That might seem quite naughty, but it does make sense most of the
time. Let’s say you have 10 groups subscribed to on server
‘nephelococcygia.com’. This server is located somewhere quite far away
from you and the machine is quite slow, so it takes 1 minute just to
find out that it refuses connection to you today. If Gnus were to
attempt to do that 10 times, you’d be quite annoyed, so Gnus won’t
attempt to do that. Once it has gotten a single “connection refused”,
it will regard that server as “down”.
So, what happens if the machine was only feeling unwell temporarily?
How do you test to see whether the machine has come up again?
You jump to the server buffer (Server Buffer) and poke it
with the following commands:
‘O’
Try to establish connection to the server on the current line
(‘gnus-server-open-server’).
‘C’
Close the connection (if any) to the server
(‘gnus-server-close-server’).
‘D’
Mark the current server as unreachable (‘gnus-server-deny-server’).
‘M-o’
Open the connections to all servers in the buffer
(‘gnus-server-open-all-servers’).
‘M-c’
Close the connections to all servers in the buffer
(‘gnus-server-close-all-servers’).
‘R’
Remove all marks to whether Gnus was denied connection from any
servers (‘gnus-server-remove-denials’).
‘c’
Copy a server and give it a new name (‘gnus-server-copy-server’).
This can be useful if you have a complex method definition, and
want to use the same definition towards a different (physical)
server.
‘L’
Set server status to offline (‘gnus-server-offline-server’).