Re: usenet via fairpoint?
On Sat, 29 Oct 2011 07:59:25 -0400, David Rysdam da...@rysdam.org wrote: Actually, what I *really* should do is ask FairPoint why their news feed is broken. Did so and heard back: Fairpoint no longer offers news services or support for news servers. Those pages are outdated. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: usenet via fairpoint?
Fairpoint no longer offers news services or support for news servers. How sad. A continuation of the trend that the Internet is something that simply operates on port 80 with a prefix of www.. . Randy -- Definition: US foreign aid: When you take money from the poor people of a rich country and give it to the rich people of a poor country. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: usenet via fairpoint?
On Fri, 28 Oct 2011 22:10:19 -0400, Michael ODonnell michael.odonn...@comcast.net wrote: Once upon a time you could pay for pretty decent NNTP access via: http://www.giganews.com/ Hm, they seem to have some of the lowest prices for full newsgroup access. So that's a pretty good deal. Among text-only feeds, this one looks good at about 1/3 the price of giganews: http://news.individual.net/overview.php Both off 14 day free trials, so I think I'll this one first. Actually, what I *really* should do is ask FairPoint why their news feed is broken. But from discussions found online, I doubt they'll even know what I'm talking about. I can't find any official claim that news.fairpoint.net is even the right server name--I got that from a fossil page in their domain that their site doesn't seem to link to. Or rather, that's just one of their sites--the plain corporate/sales one. The one that customers are apparently supposed to use, www.myfairpoint.net *won't even display on my computer* and hasn't for years. I don't know if it's actually empty or what (view source shows nothing). Firefox on Linux. This kind of complete technical incompetence makes me reluctant to get drawn into the tech support tar pit with them. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: usenet via fairpoint?
The one that customers are apparently supposed to use, www.myfairpoint.net *won't even display on my computer* and hasn't for years. I don't know if it's actually empty or what (view source shows nothing). Firefox on Linux. Hmmm. When I said this: wget -O - http://www.myfairpoint.net/ ...I got a zero-length result, but when I said this: wget -O - --user-agent=Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) http://www.myfairpoint.net/ ...I got some HTML that looked legit, so maybe you could fiddle with your browser's User Agent string. The User Agent Switcher plugin is fairly painless to install and use for such purposes, though I'm happy to report that I need to use it much less frequently than in years past as it seems that there are fewer sites suffering that sort of dainbramage these days, though fairpoint.com may still be one of them... This kind of complete technical incompetence makes me reluctant to get drawn into the tech support tar pit with them. Ugh. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: usenet via fairpoint?
On Sat, 29 Oct 2011 09:36:56 -0400, Michael ODonnell michael.odonn...@comcast.net wrote: ...I got some HTML that looked legit, so maybe you could fiddle with your browser's User Agent string. The User Agent Switcher plugin is fairly painless to install and use for such purposes, though I'm happy to report that I need to use it much less frequently than in years past as it seems that there are fewer sites suffering that sort of dainbramage these days, though fairpoint.com may still be one of them... Oh yeah, I think when the switch first happened a few years ago I determined that I could do that. But I'm really more inclined to just decline to do business with a tech company so incompetent. And if they are actually *mal*competent (i.e. deliberately excluding anyone not using IE), I'm even less inclined to trick them into letting me send them money. Of course, I still *am* doing business with them. And not even getting my money's worth, if they do have nntp that I just can't use for some reason. Which is why I raised the possibility of alternative ISPs. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: usenet via fairpoint?
On Sat, 2011-10-29 at 07:59 -0400, David Rysdam wrote: Actually, what I *really* should do is ask FairPoint why their news feed is broken. But from discussions found online, I doubt they'll even know what I'm talking about. I can't find any official claim that news.fairpoint.net is even the right server name--I got that from a fossil page in their domain that their site doesn't seem to link to. Back in my ISP days (late 90's), running my own NNTP connection just used too much bandwidth. So I bought NNTP service from slurp.net (they seem to be out of business) and proxied through one of my servers. That avoided username / password processing. They accepted connections from my server. I controlled access based on IP address. Fairpoint is (or was) probably doing something similar. Nope. $ host news.fairpoint.net news.fairpoint.net is an alias for aff-news.neonova.net. aff-news.neonova.net is an alias for news.isp.giganews.com. news.isp.giganews.com has address 216.196.97.142 So you're directly connected to giganews. Hopefully, you can find someone at Fairpoint who can provide credentials for giganews access. Maybe giganews can confirm that Fairpoint is still a customer. -- Lloyd Kvam Venix Corp DLSLUG/GNHLUG library http://dlslug.org/library.html http://www.librarything.com/catalog/dlslug http://www.librarything.com/catalog/dlslugsort=stamp http://www.librarything.com/rss/recent/dlslug ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: usenet via fairpoint?
David Rysdam da...@rysdam.org writes: On Sat, 29 Oct 2011 09:36:56 -0400, Michael ODonnell michael.odonn...@comcast.net wrote: ...maybe you could fiddle with your browser's User Agent string. The User Agent Switcher plugin is fairly painless to install and [...] Oh yeah, I think when the switch first happened a few years ago I determined that I could do that. But I'm really more inclined to just decline to do business with a tech company so incompetent. And if they are actually *mal*competent (i.e. deliberately excluding anyone not using IE), I'm even less inclined to trick them into letting me send them money. Of course, I still *am* doing business with them. And not even getting my money's worth, if they do have nntp that I just can't use for some reason. Which is why I raised the possibility of alternative ISPs. Well, G4 was mentioned here as a local ISP when MV Communications announced that they were shutting down and GNHLUG needed to find a new host; http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.gnhlug/21007 I've been using Earthlink http://www.earthlink.net/ for a number of years; for DSL or Cable, they're middlemen (reselling Fairpoint DSL, in my case), but they actually provide NNTP as part of the package (I'd switched to Comcast for a while, and then switched back to Earthlink when Comcast stopped providing NNTP service [but kept charging the same price]). FYI, Earthlink's NNTP service is actually provided by GigaNews (I'm pretty sure I actually saw this documented somewhere, at some point...; empirically, connecting to news.east.earthlink.net gets me a greeting of 200 News.GigaNews.Com). -- Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: usenet via fairpoint?
I believe that Google Groups includes a fairly comprehensive set of Usenet newsgroups. On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 10:00 PM, David Rysdam da...@rysdam.org wrote: I'm on my bi-decadely I should be reading Usenet kick and I'm having a bit of trouble. news.fairpoint.net asks for a username and password and then...nothing. Does anyone know if it actually works? If not, or if no one knows, what's the recommended workaround? Pay for access elsewhere? A better ISP? ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ -- John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux Unix Email j...@blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID 0xD5C7B5D9 PGP-Key-Fingerprint 72 FB 39 4F 3C 3B D6 5B E0 C8 5A 6E F1 2C BE 99 ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: usenet via fairpoint?
On Fri, 28 Oct 2011 22:05:40 -0400, John Abreau j...@blu.org wrote: I believe that Google Groups includes a fairly comprehensive set of Usenet newsgroups. I should be more specific: a) NNTP b) without having to log into a pervasive, invasive web service ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: usenet via fairpoint?
Once upon a time you could pay for pretty decent NNTP access via: http://www.giganews.com/ YMMV... ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
