Why my news servers always disappear

[Fred Ma]

Hi,

I posted the following, but for some reason, it
doesn't seem to show up. There are only 5 postings
showing for the past week when viewed with communicator
4.77 on Win2K. However, communicator 4.77 on solaris 8
seems to show many more postings in the last week. Both
are getting this from secnews.netscape.com. What might
cause this discrepancy?

Fred Ma

P.S. I suspect that this posting fits better in
netscape.communicator, but that newsgroup doesn't
seem to be carried by secnews.netscape.com when
viewed with communicator 4.77 on solaris. It does
however, show up in communicator 4.77 on windows.
How can such a disparity occur?

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Why my news servers always disappear
Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 05:55:02 -0400
From: Fred Ma <f...@doe.carleton.ca>
Organization: Another Netscape Collabra Server User
Newsgroups: netscape.public.general

Hello,

I've added several news servers to my preferences in
Communicator 4.77, running on solaris 8. Every time I
shut down Communicator and start it back up, only the
default server shows. I'm not sure why the other news
servers simply disappear. I have the startup files
.newsrc-blah.bleh.com, one for each added news server.
I also have a directory host-blah.bleh.com for each
news server, located in ~/.netscape/xover-cache. Each
directory has a file hostinfodat containing the host
address and details about newsgroups and articles.

I thought that Communicator must keep track of my news
servers in a file somewhere. Maybe that file had its
permissions changed. Maybe that's why Communicator
can't remember the added news servers, because it can't
write them to the file. To find which file this may
be, I did a recursive grep on my whole file system to
find occurances of the default news server. The only
files are liprefs.js and preferences.js. Both are
writable by the owner.

According to some web searching, liprefs.js has to do
with roaming, so I ignored it. The default server does
show up in preferences.js, but not the news servers
that keep disappearing. Since both files have recent
time-stamps, I suspect that Communicator writes to them
when shutting down. In fact, preferences.js is so
recently dated that I wouldn't be surprised if it gets
written whenever the preferences are editted.

So the questions remain. Shouldn't the added servers
show up in preferences.js? Why wouldn't they?

Fred
--
Fred Ma, f...@doe.carleton.ca
Carleton University, Dept. of Electronics
1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario
Canada, K1S 5B6