broken SF and LA PacBell newsservers
Ed Anderson
only ones now available to we few hundred thousand PacBell.net customers.
The SF and LA serversare identical, and point to one of two synchronized
servers that are randomly chosen when your DNS resolver looks up the
address. That address will probably be DNS cached indefinitely, so if one
of the servers is down, you won't likely get the other one by just
retrying the name. The two servers are actually identified as:
64.164.98.6 = newssvr13.news.prodigy.com
64.164.98.7 = newssvr14.news.prodigy.com
The servers really are in PacBell IP space, and Prodigy news admins claim
they are locked out, unable to manage them. They say this should change by
the end of the month when they deliver a new server to the west coast.
Posts from the PBI servers can be identified by looking at the X-Trace
for the above server names.
Even if you can log in, there are still serious delivery problems.
Most importantly, the pbinet.* groups are "write only". No articles have
appeared since Sept 30 in those groups for these two servers. The groups
do exist on other prodigy servers, though, and many "test" posts from
PacBell users are visible.
Posting this message to the pbinet groups is actually rather pointless,
since the people who need the info will never see it. I'll crosspost to
the alt.online-service.pacbell group where some may pick it up. I suggest
that everyone look for future PacBell discussions there.
This "write-only" behaviour probably affects many other groups as well.
Your posts may be going out, but you can't see any of the replies in an
active group.
Those who download large files say that even when they can see posts, they
are getting corrupted data from these two servers.
For more details about the PacBell server problems, try this group:
prodigynet.help.tech.newsgroups
You will find that helpful news admins and customer support reps are
providing answers to PacBell users there.
There is reportedly a workaround for those who must use SBC servers.
It may be possible for some Pacbell.net customers to get access to an
SBC server that carries pbinet.* by accessing the dallas server using
user...@swbell.net and a password. It would be good if SBC could
officially allow PacBell customers in another server until the problems
are resolved.
Tier three tech support is now aware of this problem, and has opened an
internal trouble ticket. Perhaps the situation will improve soon.
Such usenet tips were available at my PacHell page until yesterday, when
PacBell management threatened to cutoff my DSL service unless I removed
the entire page. Some details are now at:
People have complained that SBC is acting as a censor by splitting off
binary posts from their servers. I don't think that's the case, since
Prodigy admins say that the binaries will soon reappear on a server
dedicated to just the high bandwidth groups.
Real censorship is what they have just done by forcing me to remove a page
full of constructive information from my home computer. There was nothing
defamatory or libelous there, and their main objection was to the links I
had to other sites that made a parody of the PacBell name. This seems
like a rather arbitrary and capricious decision on their part, since the
page has been online since Feb 1999, and it's been useful to PacBell
engineers in tracking down some of their networking problems.
The real shame here is that PacBell appears to be aggressively severing
communication ties among their customers, leaving them at the mercy of
only unhelpful PacBell.net help pages and frontline tech support.
Beware that the SBC terms of service also them to disconnect users
for use of obscene language or
"... (iv)tends to damage the name or reputation of SBCIS, its parent,
affiliates and subsidiaries; or (v) interferes with other customers'
useand enjoyment of the Services provided by SBCIS."
See: http://dialup.pacbell.net/CustomerSvc/policies.html
Watch your language as long as you're an SBCIS customer!
-- Ed "boohoo" Anderson
those who know me have no need of my name
>in article tXWA7.1200$U_.835...@newssvr14.news.prodigy.com, those who
>know me have no need of my name at not-a-rea...@usa.net wrote on
>10/22/01 8:29 AM:
>>> People have complained that SBC is acting as a censor by splitting off
>>> binary posts from their servers. I don't think that's the case, since
>>> Prodigy admins say that the binaries will soon reappear on a server
>>> dedicated to just the high bandwidth groups.
>>
>> which servers will not be available to sbc-is customers. (and now that
>> sbc owns prodigy i wonder if they will materialize at all.)
>If sbcis users are just being treated as prodigy users with a special
>branding (and that is what sbc is headed towards so they can kill sbcis and
>save money), I wouldn't see why they wouldn't be. Also I doubt the sbc-pi
>consolidation will take place fast enough to derail Bill and Tom's plans.
i'm just passing on what one of the prodigy admins said. according to
them the contract for providing service to sbc-is customers requires
that the high-volume multimedia groups not be available, hence access to
the server they are building which is dedicated to those groups won't be
available to us.
--
okay, have a sig then
Telamon
those who know me have no need of my name <not-a-rea...@usa.net>
wrote:
On its face this action appears to renege on the promise to provide full
usenet access. Nobody expects them to carry all the groups but to cut
out all the binaries does not appear to follow through on the service
expected. At least that is what it looks like to me. Why are we being
cut out?
--
Telamon