news.sonic.net bad feed/massive expiration?

[rpw3]

For the last couple of days, "news.sonic.net" has been getting very few [sometimes no]
new articles and/or has been expiring old ones really quickly, even on heavily
trafficked tech groups. E.g., if I go to "comp.arch", I can only find two unexpired articles;
for "comp.lang.lisp", only one. [And a reply I posted to the latter yesterday hasn't
shown up yet, AFAICT.] "sci.crypt" is doing a little better: some threads have a whole
week's history remaining. But still...

It looks like a combination of a slow/nonexistent upstream feed
and/or a way overeager expiration of some [most?] groups.

Anybody know what's going on?

- Rob

[virtualmike]

Sounds like kgc needs to smack the server.

[tufur]

I use binsearch.net when the article server gets wonky. Binsearch will create a nzb file to use in your usenet client. Its a simple work around. Just because it doesn't show on the usenet server, doesn't mean it isn't there. I have found files that go back 300 days that way.

[ankh]

> binsearch.net

Am I too old to use the word "Awesome"?

No. First time ever. Thank you.

[scasse]

Binsearch is fine but that still doesn't answer the original question. What's up with news.sonic.net?

[miken]

Thanks for bringing this up. We are aware of the problem and are working on it right now. No hard ETA, but we're aiming at it being back within the next couple days. Thanks for the patience!

[scasse]

Thank you.

[patty1]

I've been chatting with Support about this for the past few days. I was told, "There was a partial disk failure in the overview data spool. Kelsey is currently tracking down a suitable replacement disk. Service should be restored soon." Today they said he may need to order some parts, so even though it's taking longer than hoped, a solution should be in place soon.

Last time there was a long outage on news.sonic.net, I set up an E-S account. I may switch over to that temporarily if Sonic's server isn't fixed soon.

[amayfield]

Sorry for how long it's taking to restore service. Another alternative that may be a good temporary solution for your newsgroup needs is Supernews. supernews.sonic.net, log in with your username@sonic.net. It is slower and has more restrictions than news.sonic.net but it is currently functioning.

[patty1]

Andrew, using Supernews would still require setting up a new .newsrc file and changing our NNTPSERVER variable to supernews.sonic.net, right?