[Pan-users] Re: Laptop died while downloading

[Duncan]

Fred Newtz <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Mon, 29 Sep 2008
17:01:12 -0500:

> My power cord to my laptop is all goofy and while downloading my laptop
> died.  Now when I am trying to open pan back up I get this error when I
> try and run it from the command line:
> 
> pan: parts.cc:244: void pan::Parts::set_parts(const pan::PartBatch&):
> Assertion `pch == part_mid_buf + part_mid_buf_len' failed. Aborted
> 
> Now I know that this is due to a problem with the tasks.nzb file.  I
> have a huge set of files in there for download right now and do not want
> to have to redo them all again and only get the files that have not been
> downloaded etc..  I removed the top <file ...> </file> entry and that
> did not seem to fix the problem.  How can I verify this file and make
> sure it meets the requirements of pan?

The best solution at this point would be to upgrade.  If you're still 
getting a crash with that error, the pan you are using almost certainly 
doesn't have the security patch in the latest 0.133 and in some 
distribution's patched 0.132 versions as well, since that patch was 
supposed to fix that problem.  Thus, it's definitely worth upgrading to a 
patched version, altho if your distro doesn't have one yet you will 
likely have to compile it yourself.

If you are going to continue running with the old version, tho... what 
I'd suggest is to try strace.  strace -efile pan, or possibly replace the 
-efile with -eopen.  (-efile will give you all file ops not just opens, 
but will likely produce a huge amount of output.  -eopen will be just 
file opens, so less output, but it may be harder to see the problem.)  
You may need to string that together with a grep (for the pan data dir at 
least, thus killing all the misc font, icon, library etc loads), and/or 
dump the output to a file rather than to your terminal window, and use 
search on it, to reduce the size of the output to something manageable.  
The idea of course would be to find the file it crashes on, so you can 
delete both that file (if necessary) and that bit of the tasks.nzb file, 
keeping the XML intact, of course.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman