OT to FOAK about my news server(s)

I'm on Tiscali broadband - it works well at any time. I was reading
news.tiscali.co.uk in Outlook Express. The service was patchy and tended to
go off in the evenings.

I sent 10Euro to the German server as suggested. I had the same problem -
reads fine during the day but not after late afternoon.

I installed Agent - exactly the same. It works (connects) during the day but
not in the evenings.

What is happening?

John

 

It's Tiscali telling you to change isp.

Google for posts from Adie and TOG slagging off Pipex to get more
information.

 

Traffic shaping, you need a less pikey ISP. Certainly with the cheesy
server there are alternative ports, can't recall with the sausage
munchers.

Alternatively https://www.relakks.com/?lang=eng&cid=gb

 

Individual have ports 119 and 8119

 

I have just been posing about this (see thread about Pipex News).
Tiscali/Pipex are using QOS and stopping nntp traffic at peak hours. I
have requested the MAC code and am off to a less pikey ISP. I suggest
you do the same.

 

As others have said, Tiscali, and ISPs owned by the same bunch of
cunts, are throttling NNTP traffic at peak times. The only soution is
to migrate to an ISP that guarantees they don't, which is why I'm with
IDnet.

Actually, I had an odd web outage on Saturday. News and mail working
fine, but not the web. Checked everything, decided it had to be IDnet,
called their weekend emergency number to find out what was up, got a
voicemail service, left a message, and got phoned back in less than
five minutes with: "Sorry, we've been doing some server maintenance
and had some router issues. It should be OK now."

And it was.

I don't give a stuff about ISP claims that they can offer 8MB for
£5.99 a month, or whatever. If their service is shite, then it's just
money down the drain. IDnet is costing me double what I was paying
Pipex, but I've had no dropped connections, no port throttling and no
hasles. And their help bods phone back immediately.

 

It would surely be a simple thing for an ISP to operate a whitelist of
known text-only news servers, if binaries are their problem.
But no, that's too fucking obvious.
--
Dave
GS850x2 XS650 SE6a

"A scone and tea at half past three
Makes the day a little brighter
Keep your cakes and fancy tarts
And stick them up your shiter."

 

Customer Service only means you paying their bills on time.

 

Thanks for that info. I'm stuck with Tiscali for a year. I fondly imagined
that they were simply shutting off their own news server in the evenings to
save bandwidth. I thought that by paying for the German server I would
simply be able to access it on my broadband connection as I would any other
site. I didn't realise that Tiscali would block traffic to and from the
German server.

Then I read the letters NNTP. This I assume is a sort of web file data that
is newsgroup specific, and it's this type of data that Tiscali block in the
evenings.


John

 

To a certain extent they are all blocking something somewhere[1] at the
moment, your mileage with exactly what, where and when may differ.



[1] My isp, Force9 (aka Plusnet, aka BT SomethingOrOther, aka the Pru
Pension fund) have been having a bit of a spam problem since they had
their webmail servers hacked last spring and are in the process of
rolling out a new anti-spam "solution", this has caused me to read their
user newsgroups/forii.

One of the things I have learnt from it is there is a big shortage of
bandwidth at higher levels for all of them and it is all our fault for
demanding to use the services they have sold to us in good faith so they
are restricting our access to it all until we pay them(BT SomethingElseE
ntirelyThatIsInFactAWhollyOwnedSubsidary?) more to put in more.

 

it's nothing to do with the web. NNTP is the Usenet transmission
protocol that runs over IP.

 

Get configured to use news.motzarella.org which gets around Tiscali most of
the time and reader.motzarrela.org for times that it doesn't.

 

These are two discrete organisations then, right?

 

you really are a picky old spelling-and-grammar-fascist, aren't you?

 

That's the first time for a while I've stuck my head round the door of
that particular closet, ityf. It may well have been a genuine query,
in any case - two different ports, perhaps?

 

Ignoring my hasty spelling (!!) they are the same org www.motzarella.org but
use different ports.
news.x uses non standard port 443 for NNTPS and on reader.x port 80.

Port 119 NNTP and 563 NNTPS are regularly BLOCKED by Tiscali (and the
clones). Note: not traffic management but port blocking, though the cunts
deny it.
Sometimes they do traffic manage and then NNTPS on port 443 will also fail.

 

It requires that they'd hire SWK, and you can't do that on 5.99/month.

 

They offered me that. My response was that there was no point how fast a
connection they gave me if they throttled the one service (and,
ironically, the lowest-bandwidth one) that I use every day.

Who cares? if they don't connect you, move on.

 

Um, go what as well? Ballistic? Blue with cold?

 

Sadly Paul will just get fobbed off.