I don't suppose for one minute anyone missed me but on June 17th PlusNet stopped connecting me to newsgroups. Initial phone calls drew a blank as support staff denied they were ever supported, or had no idea what a newsgroup is! After several emails and "open tickets" I eventually connected with a support person who understood and went looking for the problem.
Hey presto, this morning, almost a month later here I am back wasting time with you guys:-)
Mike
Plusnet have a news server?!?!?!?
(goes off to have a shufti...)
A *MONTH*?!?!?!?!?! I'd find a new ISP, were I you. A&A are good.
Just don't let it happen again, or you may be expelled!
Plusnet buy in their NewServer capacity from Giganews.
Without knowing the actual details, for some reason Plusnet addresseses are somethimes rejected by Giganews, after having been successfully connected for weeks or even months. A common symptom is to ask for a password which is then rejected. A way around this is to disconnect the router and reconnect after which a new NNTP address will be assigned which should work. Assuming the user doesn't have a fixed address.
It can also help to be already subscibed to a freebie such as Eternal September just in case
michael adams
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Allegedly, GN changed their IP addresses and Plusnet had to update their firewall.
To avoid any future problems, use one of the free news providers like AIOE or Eternal September. Then it doesn't matter if your ISP stops news - or changes provider.
usenet.plus.net - port 119
I've never had a problem with it.
It's a known problem that from time to time some of PN's IP address ranges aren't recognised by GigaNews. A message by Bob Pullen elsewhere suggests they've recently added at least one range (for Waitrose customers) so maybe others were fixed at the same time?
So how could they stop you accessing them, Did they block a port or what? Of course they are suffering the plight of selling out to BT. Brian
And yet I've not noticed any problems at all...
Perhaps because I use news.plus.net, rather than usenet.plus.net - or perhaps not. They are the same host.
Andy
I was going to report excitedly that PlusNet has over 10 years worth of usenet posts archived, so I suppose that explains it. Although it did meant, after dashing off and finding the PN server, I wasted 2 hours fighting with Thunderbird as it attempted to deal with 1.4 million headers from uk.diy.
I have no knowledge of what or how it was blocking me. All I know is my password was rejected every time I tried to log on.
Mike
Its actually not quite as bad as it seems. I was visiting suppliers factories in China for 16 days so was without access, or time, anyway. Only
3 days after I returned did I chase them up again.Mike
You can safely assume a hundred headers a day in this NG, say 700 for the past week's worth. How far back do you need to go? :-)
I meant to pass comment on that 1.4 million headers figure. At an average of 100 per day that would correspond to just over 38 years. Obviously the posting rate into this NG has dropped off considerably in recent years. I dread to imagine what it must have peaked at.
Thunderbird suggests to me that the number is about twice that. I have a
7-day retention policy and it currently reports 1,484 articles.
We have two Usenet feeds. One based on IP authentication (Plusnet), and the other based on username/password authentication (Madasafish and some of the other brands we look after).
The Plusnet hostnames were not affected.
As (the other) Bob's alluded to, Giganews added new hosts to their authentication platform without any forewarning. We had to reactively update our Firewall config so Giganews servers could talk to ours again.
This took longer than it should have due to a few misunderstandings along the way.
/The Plusnet hostnames were not affected.
As (the other) Bob's alluded to, Giganews added new hosts to their authentication platform without any forewarning. We had to reactively update our Firewall config so Giganews servers could talk to ours again.
This took longer than it should have due to a few misunderstandings along the way. /Q
So what was unusual about muddymike's predicament? as other plusnetters including me were not affected (ever in my case)....
Jim K
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