I'm back!

Following a hard drive crash about three weeks ago, I lost Usenet access for a couple of weeks. It turned out to be a conflict between Avast! and the Gignews servers. I had to turn off checking of SSL servers in Avast! to sort it.

I did hear some grumbling from other Plusnet customers about lack of access to (the outsourced to giganews) usenet, due to a new range of IP addresses not being recognised, I escape that by having a fixed IP subnet.

Um, why on earth didn't you switch to one of the many free servers?

Tim

I'm not that clever/knowledgeable about IT stuff, and couldn't get here to ask. For future ref where do I find a free server that doesn't go through my internet provider?

Mike

Eternal September, Albasani, aioe.net.......

I and many others find it worth paying 10 Euros a year to news.indivdual.net for spam filtering, although they only carry text groups, not binaries.

I use both aioe and news september as neither carries all the groups I read - and the amount of spam which gets through those is hardly worth paying to avoid. Like a couple of posts a week.

As a matter of interest, who is your internet provider? I had a problem with the giganews usenet provision through Plusnet, used their help forum and within minutes received advice which completely fixed the problem for me.

Here's the embarrassing bit: the advice was to switch off my router and switch it on again. I didn't think of that for myself because everything else was working normally. (That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.)

Nick

Some listed here:

Also Plusnet. I had several phone conversations and replies to an enquiry ticket over three weeks, then middle of last week received the message above! Nothing more from them, I just tried opening news groups this morning and they are working again.

Mike

Muudy Who?

Lol

Welcome back Mike

Its always worth subscribing to Eternal September which is free and can be a useful back-up. As usually when Eternal September is down, my normal provider Plusnet/Giganews is working.

When you subscribe they email you a password and username. There can be a bit of faffing around at first with setting it up, as the newreader may not accept the password (or something like that) but it will work eventually.

I had a problem in the past with Plusnet/Giganews which was solved by rebooting the router

michael adams

...

I also have had problems with Giganews and Agent 7 - Agent is sometimes unable to automatically download all bodies of messages for which it has downloaded the headers.

Giganews blame Agent: Fort have investigated - I have sent them in depth system monitor reports - and the problems remain (sometimes).

Thought Plusnet was perfect?

It's worth paying a few bob a year for something supported.

They're fairly honest when they're not ...