Hi,

I'm happily using leafnode and really like the 15 minute fetchnews cron
job. However, the machine I'm running on is a laptop. As such, it
doesn't have a permanent internet connection.

There are two improvements that would be great: firstly, fetchnews could
exit silently when there is no network connection. This would avoid the
occasional email I get from cron complaining that I didn't have a
connection up on a 00,15,30,45 minute mark. I don't know whether there's
a more "server-oriented" way to check this than requiring something
massive and desktoppy like network-manager, though.

Secondly, to avoid having to wait for the next 15 minute mark when I
resume my laptop from sleep, I've got the following in
/etc/network/if-up.d/99leafnode.

This works nicely... except if I resume my laptop at XX:44 or the
like. Then I get an email complaining about the lockfile being held when
the cron job starts.

Would it be possible to store the locking time in the lockfile so that
do-fetch-news could choose to exit silently if the other process had
been going less than 10 minutes (say)? That would avoid ignoring
permanent lockups, but would also avoid spamming root if he/she
intentionally starts fetchnews near the same time.

I could happily code up patches for either of the above (I think I can
see how to do the latter), but I thought I should check first whether
they had any chance of being accepted.

Any help/comments gratefully received!

Rupert