**MERGED** No newsgroups server?

[fred]

I haven't been able to connect to the news server for over a day now.
Previously it has been O.K. although occasionally intermittent.

Has something been changed that I haven't been told about?

Nigel

[paulyoung666]

Originally Posted by fred

I haven't been able to connect to the news server for over a day now.
Previously it has been O.K. although occasionally intermittent.

Has something been changed that I haven't been told about?

Nigel

hi and to the site , do a search for newsgroups on here and you will soon get the picture

[td444]

In short its not a pretty "site".

If your relying on newsgroups, look at http://www.newsgroupservers.net/ - some nice listings there.

Im with newshosting myself, works well, full speed @1mbit but there's plenty of others too , to have a look at.

[stephen2]

Originally Posted by fred

I haven't been able to connect to the news server for over a day now.
Previously it has been O.K. although occasionally intermittent.

Has something been changed that I haven't been told about?

Nigel

To be honest Nigel I've got a feeling that NTL have pulled the plug out on the only servers that have been reliably working during the past few months.

These have been;
62.253.162.114
62.253.162.115
194.168.222.40
194.168.222.41

Now I can't get anything from them so with the others having problems in not being able to download posts before they crash out, NTL has effectively withdrawn the newsgroup service from me.

Unless anyone who's well informed can inform me of which servers are now working correctly.

[Musicman]

I have not been able to use the two following newgroups since the latter part of next week, as my newsgrabber software reports a "503 Program Fault - Function Not Performed": -

news.cache.cable.ntlworld.com
newscache.cable.ntlworld.com

Are thes servers down or have they been discontinued?

I attempted to reply to another thread with this question, but for some reason I was not allowed to, and I was kept on being asked to Login, even though I was already logged in.

[paulyoung666]

Originally Posted by Musicman

I have not been able to use the two following newgroups since the latter part of next week, as my newsgrabber software reports a "503 Program Fault - Function Not Performed": -

news.cache.cable.ntlworld.com
newscache.cable.ntlworld.com

Are thes servers down or have they been discontinued?

I attempted to reply to another thread with this question, but for some reason I was not allowed to, and I was kept on being asked to Login, even though I was already logged in.

again , do a search on this site for newsgroups and you will find all the answers , whether you want them or not

[Matth]

For text groups, might just as well use http://news.individual.net/

[Tricky]

You get what you pay for! (or do you) - I personally have used claranews for the past 18 months and can happily say (touch wood) have never once had a problem with them. Max's out my bandwidth on downloads no problem and they have probably a 4-5 day retention on the largest groups

Originally Posted by Musicman

I have not been able to use the two following newgroups since the latter part of next week, as my newsgrabber software reports a "503 Program Fault - Function Not Performed": -

news.cache.cable.ntlworld.com
newscache.cable.ntlworld.com

Are thes servers down or have they been discontinued?

I attempted to reply to another thread with this question, but for some reason I was not allowed to, and I was kept on being asked to Login, even though I was already logged in.

good question - I tried to add 'news.cache' as an account & it failed

'news.ntlworld.com' seems to work, & of course text.news.ntlworld.com, still

[fred]

Thanks for the prompt to try 'news.ntlworld.com' it works for me.
But why is this info not coming from NTL?
As customers shouldn't we expect to be informed!?

[Neil]

Originally Posted by fred

Thanks for the prompt to try 'news.ntlworld.com' it works for me.
But why is this info not coming from NTL?
As customers shouldn't we expect to be informed!?

You obvously don't know ntl very well-communication is practically non existant when it comes to ntl & their customers I'm afraid.

[rdhw]

For reference:

Almost all the publicly-known NTL news server addresses (e.g. news.cable.ntlworld.com, news.ntlworld.com, text.news.ntlworld.com) are all now identical aliases of news.ntli.net, which resolves to eight possible IP addresses on a round-robin basis:

news.ntli.net internet address = 194.168.222.120
news.ntli.net internet address = 194.168.222.121
news.ntli.net internet address = 194.168.222.122
news.ntli.net internet address = 194.168.222.123
news.ntli.net internet address = 194.168.222.124
news.ntli.net internet address = 62.253.162.201
news.ntli.net internet address = 62.253.162.202
news.ntli.net internet address = 62.253.162.203
news.ntli.net internet address = 62.253.162.204

The 194.168.222 addresses are at Guildford, the 62.253.162 ones at Winnersh.

So it makes no difference what DNS name you use for the news server, you always end up at the same round-robin. Unfortunately, the round-robin on the DNS server is defeated by the DNS handling in Outlook Express, which will always re-use the IP address it used previously for the same DNS name. The only way to defeat that seems to be to quit OE and go in again.

There is also a DNS resolver cache in Windows XP, but that seems to honour the round-robin allocation. If needs be, you can clear the XP DNS cache using the command ipconfig /flushdns but I don't think this will help much.

If you are unlucky and OE picks up from the round-robin the IP address of a news server which happens to be broken at present, then OE makes it very difficult to move on to the next IP address in the round-robin, unless you quit OE and re-launch it. This is an OE problem, rather than an NTL problem.

The exceptions to the above round-robin are all the DNS names for news servers which have "cache" in their name. All of these are identical aliases for newscache.cable.ntlworld.com which yields a round-robin on two of the proxy servers at Bromley:

newscache.cable.ntlworld.com internet address = 80.1.224.5
newscache.cable.ntlworld.com internet address = 80.1.224.4

but I have no idea whether these news servers are actually working.

If you have trouble with news servers in OE, then you could try specifying one of the IP addresses in the first round-robin above (instead of the DNS name for NTL news), until you find one that works reliably.

[Rik]

Subscribe to www.giganews.com you wont regret it.
Granted you shouldnt have to subscribe to a third party NG server but unfortunately you do

As for the NTL NG Trials, that seemed to be a bit hit and miss
Does anyone know if it was a success at all?

[Foo Fighter]

http://news.astraweb.com/ much cheaper and very good i must say

I tried astraweb on a free account, it was very good.

afaik the server is in Germany? - ready to be corrected