Discontinued backup usenet server causes jobs to hang...

[ctower]

I'm just going to leave this here for other Shaw users searching for an explanation of this behavior.

As of March 1st, 2016 Shaw has shutdown access to their usenet servers. Now I'm sure nobody was using these servers as their primary server, but some might, like me, have left the server active in sabnzbd and tagged it as a backup server.

This week I checked in on my sabnzbd queue and was surprised to see a list of 15 jobs complete up to the last 2 to 5 MB, but not one job had completed since March 1st. No error messages, no entries in the sabnzbd logs, no indication in status that anything was pending or hung connections.

After restarting the service, rebuilding the queue, reinstalling the app, and resubmitting the nzbs, the jobs continued to stop at the end and just sit there. It wasn't until I started confirming server settings and testing connections did I come across my lowly Shaw backup server entry, which would not connect. I then discovered that the Shaw Usenet service was no more. As soon as I deleted that server entry all of the jobs proceeded to process normally all the way through.

So I guess these jobs were waiting for the last little bit of data from the backup server (or something like that), but I'm surprised that a timeout threshold was not met as I could see that some of these jobs were in this state for days.

[sander]

FWIW: I sometimes have the same experience in case of non-functioning newsservers. It feels like (and nothing more than that) the last download blocks have been assigned to the non-functioning newsserver, which then stalls the download.
In my case restarting SABnzbd seems to work around it.