Eternal-September problems

[patty1]

I don't think the current problems with accessing E-S are anything that Sonic can do anything about, but I could be wrong. I'm posting here mainly because I know there are other E-S users among Sonic subscribers, and I'm hoping that one of you may have a bead on what's going on.

I think the problems started a few days ago when a new E-S server IP address had to be propagated through the DNS system, but as far as I know, that happened a couple of days ago. I was able to get into E-S's news server intermittently on Monday and Tuesday. But no joy recently. Here's the latest set of error messages, which I've been getting since yesterday evening when trying to connect from Sonic's shell server:

patty1% trn
Connecting to news.eternal-september.org...connection to 176.9.11.100: Connection refused
giving up...
failed.
Connecting to news.eternal-september.org...connection to 176.9.11.100: Connection refused
giving up...
failed.
Couldn't open any newsrc groups. Is your access file ok?

I don't know which access file that's referring to, but I haven't changed anything on my end.

I've been able to view the E-S support newsgroup via Google Groups:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum ... er.support

There's been discussion of the problems, but no recent updates about them. The Server Status page on the E-S website says that both news servers are up.

Is there anything that we E-S users can do to get connected?

[joemuller]

Patty,

I've tried connecting to news.eternal-september.org from both shell.sonic.net and a server outside Sonic's network - still getting a 'connection refused' error.

What I *have* been able to get working is using TLSv1 to connect via (TCP) port 563. (I used my Thunderbird client for testing, but if your preferred reader supports TLS connections, it should work.

Hopefully normal connections on port 119 will work soon, but for now, it seems the best (and only) option is to use the alternate port.

-- Joe

[patty1]

Thanks, Joe. There's probably a way to get trn to use a different port (it's an infinitely versatile program!), but for now, I'll wait and see whether the usual configuration starts working. Just tried again (1:20 p.m. on Wednesday) with no luck, but will give it a little longer.

[dherr]

If looks like the web interface for them was working while the port 119 issue was happening, so a good tip is to try that route and check the group:

eternal-september.support

Via:

https://www.eternal-september.org/WebClient/

I think it is all fixed up now.

[edit]...

Not seeming fixed yet after all. I had refreshed a "gmane" group and the eternal-september.support with gmane working fine and the ET group working and then not working. And then checking a group in the regular hierarchy it is currently not working for me.

[final edit?]...
Seems that the Pan newsreader (in Fedora for me) is now happy to run with port 563 secured connections for eternal september, so I was able to get my setup fully working again.

[patty1]

Yeah, it was back last night and then this morning until a few minutes ago...