Usenet questions

[xox]

Hi

I'm wondering if kgc or anyone else has an update to Sonic.net's consideration of either dropping or improving usenet access?

I'm also wondering which is better, supernews.sonic.net or news.sonic.net. And did I read correctly that 2 connections is all one can get?

[aw]

supernews is the one that's limited to 2 64kbps connections, and it has better retention than news.sonic.net. news.sonic.net I'm not sure of the connection limit, but the connections aren't throttled so you can max out your bandwidth.

[Jeff]

While perusing the various posts, I saw several usenet servers mentioned, but it is not clear what their status is.

news.sonic.net, port 119, no login, this seems to be unavailable
altnews.sonic.net, port 119?, no login, this seems to be unavailable
supernews.sonic.net, port 119, sonic login, this seems to be available with a limit of 2 connections and speed cap of around 64KB/s per connection.

Have some of the above servers been discontinued?
Is SSL available for supernews or the others?
Thanks.

[aw]

news.sonic.net, port 119, no login, this seems to be unavailable

[adub@muscledog ~]$ telnet news.sonic.net 119
Trying 199.245.68.61...
Connected to news.sonic.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
200 nnrp1.nntp.sonic.net NNRP Service Ready - news@sonic.net (posting ok).

Looks fine to me?

[Jeff]

Thanks, you're right. I tried it on another computer and it works fine, so it must be a problem on that one computer with sabnzbd.

altnews.sonic.net doesn't even resolve the name, so I guess that information was old news (haha).

Do you know if ssl is available for supernews? I tried a few ports, but none worked.

[xox]

Update: supernews working with max 2 connections, news.sonic.net working with max 6 connections.

[xox]

Would I be right in thinking, based on observations, that news.sonic.net is text only, and only the two allowed supernews threads allow binaries?

[aw]

From what I can tell, news.sonic allows binaries with retention varying per group, about 20-30 days.

[xox]

Interesting. I've seen zero downloads from that server on sabnzbd+. I wonder why that is...

[Brian]

My password is now being denied at supernews.sonic.net but news.sonic.net is still working. It doesn't have anything in the alt.binaries.sounds.radio.coasttocoast.am but a couple of others are still updating OK.

I read in another post that supernews access could end at any time without notice so I'm guessing this has now happened. Any good sugestions for access to another server for my less then 10GB per month of ussage? I remember seeing one where you could purchase blocks of data rather then paying by the month but I can't find it right now.