Usenet Feed

[#1]

I'm sure this is the wrong place to post, but it's the nearest I could find.

Tonight I came back to my machine to find a warning from AVG about a trojan in a usenet posting. On investigation, it turned out to be a post from 2008 in comp.databases.mysql. I use 3 usenet servers, and this newsgroup is set to download from news.plus.net.

The download process had downloaded around 24,000 articles out of a total waiting for download of about 80,000. Killing news.plus.net as a feed set the queue back to the normal 2 or 3.

My news and email client is the ancient, lovely, reliable Turnpike.

Has the Plusnet useeed suffered some sort of glitch?

[#2]

I thought I was alone. I experienced similar earlier. Not the trojan alert, but my newsreader (Thunderbird) redownloaded posts from all the groups I was subscribed to under news.plus.net

Edit: I've contacted Giganews for comment.

[#3]

Moderator's note:

Thread moved from Email to Everything Else.

[#4]

news.plus.net? They keep that quiet! Any pointers to a setup page?

[#5]

It's IP authenticated. You just need to point your news reader to news.plus.net from a Plusnet connection. You'll only find text groups there though.

[#6]

So, is it at my end that I need to do something, or is this still broken?

I've moved most of the newsgroups I follow away from news.plus.net, but I've just activated it again and it's now downloading 55,000 or so usenet messages into a smallish number of newsgroups.

I'm running Turnpike on an XP virtual machine here now so that I can still use it now that I've just moved over to 64-bit Windows 7, so I'll probably leave it downloading as a stress test, but in normal use this would be a complete pain.

[#7]

So, in 10+ hours it has downloaded 34000 usenet postings, leaving 21000 still to do. The newsgroups still using  the Plusnet news feed here are 6 associated with Plusnet (eg plusnet.service.status) and just one database group. I assume most of the Plusnet ones are now obsolete, so it is a complete waste of time letting them continue to download all these postings from 2008 onwards.

The test usenet group is still useful, although demon.test is still there for that, but it would be good to know if any of the other groups have not been abandoned.

I do hope this service is not being wound down. Even if there is a current problem, it is good to have it as a backup for aioe and  eternal september.

[#8]

Are these newly subscribed groups that are downloading the messages? If so, then that's what I would expect to happen and the volume of posts being downloaded should be dictated/controlled by the newsreader.

If they're groups you were already subscribed to, then I suspect the article numbering may have changed when the discussed problem occurred and you're only just seeing the pain having left the account dormant for a while. If this is the case, things should settle once the posts have been downloaded.

The main private Plusnet group where there's still activity is plusnet.service.customer-feedback.

[#9]

The problem presumably occurred on or just before the 25th August. I am fairly sure I would have noticed the huge download if it had started much earlier. As I said, my AV popped up a warning about a problem with one of the database postings dated 2008, and it was that date that made me look into things.

I have changed nothing here, except that I disabled the Plusnet usenet collection on about the 25th, after moving about 3 or 4 well used groups off the Plusnet feed and on to Eternal Sept.

I replaced my main W7 32-bit machine with a new-to-me laptop with mSATA boot drive and a 1TB, slowish HD as the 😧 drive. Turnpike was just copied across and installed,making it identical to the version on the old machine, but on a VM.

I am running the Virtual machine off this 😧 drive and, as I now have the space, I decided to re-enable the Plusnet feed. So this just re-enabled downloads from the 7 groups that I put on hold back in August.

plusnet.service.customer-feedback is one of the 6 Plus groups.

Thanks Bob.