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Old 11-07-2009, 03:06 PM posted to rec.gardens.orchids
[email protected] pakrat@usenet.pr.neotoma.org is offline
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First recorded activity by GardenBanter: Jun 2008
Posts: 164
Default Looking for a new server....

On Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:03:42 -0400 in tenman wrote:
I tried both teranews and motzarella last summer when my ISP was messed
up; neither worked and neither seems to have any tech assistance - or at
least any that would respond to queries and requests for help.

I gave up. Eventually my ISP got itself figured out, and I have
newsgroup access again.


eternal-september.support and motzarella.support both exist on
news.eternal-september.org
The fellow behind eternal-september.org regularly reads those newsgroups
and is quite patient at helping folks that actually manage to setup a
new newserver/user profile in their newsreader and make it to the server.
He also puts some fairly explicit instructions for most newsreaders on his
website (I know, I had to use them for slrn).

The only thing he doesn't do is give a quick tutorial on checking to see
if it's working by hand. And here's one.
Works from the shell prompt of any OS with a telnet client.
On Windows that would be a cmd.exe window or a command.com window.


telnet newsserver 119
If you see something like

Connected to news.eternal-september.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
200 news.eternal-september.org InterNetNews NNRP server INN 2.5.0 ready (posting ok)

or

Connected to news.teranews.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
200 (newsfe15.iad) -- Welcome (Tornado v1.2.7.560-1)

You've got one hurdle down.

Now teranew is a slight pain in the butt that they require auth for
reaching their support newsgroup.

I type "group teranews.support" and hit enter
and get
480 Authentication Required

There's a nice check box in the thunderbird newsserver configuration that
says something like "ALWAYS USE AUTHENTICATION."
Check it. Glub only knows why it isn't automatically checked if you
give it a username and password.
Glub also only knows why when username and password change it doesn't
immediately assume that it needs to re-retrieve the entire grouplist again.
However, Ray was kind enough to explain that in his thunderbird
instructions.


--
Chris Dukes