news.plus.net problems

[#1]

Are there any known problems with the news servers?  I haven't been able to fetch any articles all morning.

[#2]

Seems to be working fine here.

[#3]

It seems to be working again now.

[#4]

Nor aware of any problems that have affected the news servers today, nothing in p.s.customer-feedback either.

[#5]

Thanks, Bob.  I didn't get any news for most of the day, everything else seemed to be working though.  It's still OK now.  The log file from Hamster was like this:

2009/06/01 14:51:01 D   {a54} TClientSocketNNTP > XOVER 92804-92804
2009/06/01 14:51:01 D   {a54} TClientSocketNNTP < 224 xover information follows
2009/06/01 14:51:02 I   {a54} [news.plus.net, microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.compactframework]  Loading up to 1 articles ...
2009/06/01 14:51:02 D   {a54} TClientSocketNNTP > ARTICLE 92804
2009/06/01 14:51:02 WAR {a54} Receiving data from news.plus.net failed
2009/06/01 14:51:02 ERR {a54} [news.plus.net] Answer with empty response
2009/06/01 14:51:02 I   {a54} {newsjobs news.plus.net} Disconnecting ...

[#6]

Just after I posted last it stopped working again

[#7]

Very odd. Do you know how many threads your news client/proxies are using? If it exceeds our arrangement with Giganews then you can get authentication errors. Might also be worth trying the IP address instead of the host name to rule out DNS problems. This could break if we ever change the underlying IP though (which is something we've done quite recently).
The IP addy is 216.196.109.145.

[#8]

At present I am using the default settings so there is no limit to the number of threads used by Hamster.  What's a suitable value?
The problem now seems to be intermittent.  Yesterday afternoon if I kept trying hamster will fetch news it would work after a few attempts.  There does not seem to be a problem in posting so I doubt it is a DNS issue.  I will try using the IP address, but it is working again now - hopefully for good this time

[#9]

Restricting hamster to a single thread does not make any difference.
If I use the IP address (on a subset of the newsgroups) then it works more often, but not always.  However 'nslookup' on news.plus.net always works when I run it manually.
The problem seems to be best early in the morning and late afternoon and worse nearer midday.  I'm not seeing any other problems which I would expect if there is a DNS issue.

[#10]

OK, so threads are ruled out then if the problem still happens when you're using just the one. DNS doesn't seem to be the culprit either if the problems persists when using the IP address. Still yet to see anybody else reporting problems. How have you got things set up at your end as we might be able to try replicating what you're seeing?

[#11]

I'm not 100% on the exact setup here (this is happening at work).  The company tends to use Microsoft software so I think we are using Small Business Server.  I have XP SP3.

[#12]

Doing odd things on Thunderbird (under linux here).
It showed two new message and when I clicked on the news group it showed no new headers and then took about 30 seconds to get two headers and when I clicked on the first header it took about 20 seconds to get the message. The second message came down immediately.

[#13]

I'm getting the following:-
[14:45:45] Level: ERROR  MODULE=InterSocket, MSG=Error: Connection Failed, Host: usenet.plus.net Error Code: 10060:1106
Been same most of the day.

[#14]

Though I would try a ping:-

ken@nas:~$ ping usenet.plus.net
PING europe.isp.giganews.com (216.196.109.145) 56(84) bytes of data.
^Z
[1]+  Stopped                 ping usenet.plus.net
ken@nas:~$ ping news.plus.net
PING europe.isp.giganews.com (216.196.109.145) 56(84) bytes of data.
^Z
[2]+  Stopped                 ping news.plus.net
ken@nas:~$ 

So no answer from the server, has the ip changed and the dns not caught up yet?

[#15]

Hmm.  Seems to be okay from here:
C:\Documents and Settings\jbailey>ping news.plus.net
Pinging europe.isp.giganews.com [216.196.109.145] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 216.196.109.145: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=123
Reply from 216.196.109.145: bytes=32 time=39ms TTL=123
Reply from 216.196.109.145: bytes=32 time=37ms TTL=123
Reply from 216.196.109.145: bytes=32 time=35ms TTL=123
Ping statistics for 216.196.109.145:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 25ms, Maximum = 39ms, Average = 34ms
C:\Documents and Settings\jbailey>ping usenet.plus.net
Pinging europe.isp.giganews.com [216.196.109.145] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 216.196.109.145: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=123
Reply from 216.196.109.145: bytes=32 time=55ms TTL=123
Reply from 216.196.109.145: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=123
Reply from 216.196.109.145: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=123
Ping statistics for 216.196.109.145:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 30ms, Maximum = 55ms, Average = 37ms