Earthling

The cardinal rule of software development, when in doubt search USENET. It is still better than the web for answering the most delicate technical questions. USENET is still very much a part of my social network.

Personally, my entire earthlink experience has gone steadily down hill for about a year or longer now. My DSL connection has frequent disconnects, and is very difficult to get reconnected for hours at a time, two to three times a week. I call for technical support and I get someone calling themselves Karl, or Bob, or Dave who barely speaks broken English and who never offer much help. Usually, they run me through the same things I've already tried, with me telling them I've already tried it, and in the end not solving the problem. I will very soon be moving into an area that has more options where internet connectivity is concerned and I will definitely be exploring other options.

Jim Doemer

More horse squeeze from you blood suckers? How about refunding the money I have been faithfully paying for your non-service News Server. Put up or shut up or offer me a refund!

I applaud the recent announcement to outsource usenet to Supernews.

My only question is why it's taken so long to do so. Yes, we news addicts are a tiny minority of EL users, but definitely not shy about the chronic problems.

I've been a customer for 10 years (Mindspring, then EL), and have needed a supplemental server the whole time.

As a subscriber of one of the many companies sucked up in the great mergers I've been dissapointed with the steady decline in service. My original ISP, Teleport was a nice regional that was responsive to users. Onemain took it over and things went downhill. Then Earthlink. Further downhill. I hope you succed but I'm not holding my breath.

Thanks, Ken. Let's just say that the planets finally lined up and waving the chicken bones over the computers helped. Oh, and by the way we got an official Product manager over USENET and had a great team working on putting the business case together.

Also head over to earthlink.support.usenet as there is some additional discussion going on there as well.

Thanks, I got here from the usenet group.

Glad you put someone in official charge of things. And you 'had' a great team working on the business case? Things have already been decided?

Yeah, it's pretty much a done deal. We did look at a handful of providers before making the decision and moving forward. The "had" referred to the business case; we are all still working on make the transition a smooth one and to make sure you guys experience an increase in performance.

So as it currently stands we have 5gb uncapped and anything over that gets throttled to 64kbps/sec. With the new service what will happen when we hit 5gb? Will we be throttled or simply cutoff?

Why did EL Spend so much money just short 3-4 years ago to do this dropping of in-house NNTP now? Remember the East And West Farm and the broken promise of no limits??? Is there no corporate memory?

From: chris [chris@Domain-EarthLink.net]
Subject: new news farm update
Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2002 04:56:03 GMT
[quote]The budget was approved by senior management, and we'll begin hardware purchases and acquisition sometime next week. I'd expect a cutover within two months.[/quote]

From: chris [chris@Domain-EarthLink.net]
Subject: Re: any word on tiered news access?
Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2002 21:18:30 GMT
[quote]The initial rollout won't incorporate tiered pricing plans. It is being considered by management.[/quote]

This 5 Gig/rolling 30 days is a joke. I knew when it was posted as a temporary thing in the newsgroup that it was a veiled lie. There was no reason to have run Newstest2 unlimited for so long and then suddenly (after seeing it could handle the load) place limits.

From: chris [chris@Domain-EarthLink.net]
Subject: newstest2 - download limits
Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2002 05:06:57 GMT
[quote]Hello,

This message pertains to newstest2 *only*:

We've implemented quotas for download consumption on newstest2, due to some occurances of abuse. During a window of the last 30 days, members are considered "over quota" if they exceed 30GB. There are a few dozen users
that seem to be impacting performance for other users; the top member has downloaded over 500GB in the last 30 days, and others fall shortly behind him.

Once the 30GB limit has been hit, connections will be limited to 64kbit/s.

A website will be made available shortly to review account usage for each day of the previous 30 days.[/quote]

From: chris [chris@Domain-EarthLink.net]
Subject: Re: newstest2 - download limits
Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2002 06:22:06 GMT
[quote]The website to check one's usage is available at:
http://newstest2-www.news.pas.earthlink.net

If the website does not come up for you, please try again in a few hours.
They just added it to DNS this afternoon.

I was incorrect earlier; the limits are 20GB.
[/quote]

Then there was the infamous email of 2003 with the 1.5 Gigs per 30 Day cap added to production servers after it was said that would never happen as caps were for Test Servers only.

[quote]Subject: EarthLink Newsgroup Service Changes
Date: Tue, Jul 22 2003 13:00:00 PDT 2003

Dear EarthLink Newsgroup User,

We are pleased to announce an upgrade to our Usenet service, effective immediately.

Our new service includes increased speeds, longer article retention, more newsgroups, and a choice of servers to make your Usenet experience better than ever. To take advantage of our new service, you will need to make a few simple changes to your Usenet software settings.

First, you will need to change your newsgroup server name to either:

news.west.earthlink.net or news.east.earthlink.net

Additionally, we are changing our Usenet access policies to better serve all of our users. Members will be permitted to download a maximum of 1500MB (1.5GB) over a rolling 30-day period. [/quote]

Which was changed to 5 Gig per 30 Days when originally it was 30 Gigs per 30 days then lowered to 20 Gigs per 30 days on the Test servers.

Earthlink owes a lot to the long term customers that have had so many groups withheld for so long that it is not funny and with the silly caps and now wanting us to pay more for what should be part of the package due to EL's higher cost is a joke. Now you expect we will pay more to get a service that we have paid a premium for in EL higher rates than any other DSL provider that carries news also in-house does? Please stop. There should be no limits and no extra fees.

Does the brass need a reminder of the history and the broken promises?

I have nearly all of it and can share it if they are too new to know it.

Hey Dr. Olds, you're right of course, but that was in 2002. Over the years, the case for outsourcing to a good partner instead of funding the upkeep of the service including increasing licensing costs, hardware replacements and maintenance, became more and more attractive. It allows us to provide better service and reduce our costs. It wasn't for a lack of trying, but in the end, we needed to make a decision what is best for our customers.

As I said before, the details are still being worked out for our Phase II offering. If you have suggestions, please feel free to send them to me, and I'll be happy to present them to the project team.

What Earthlink is missing is that "this change" is not going to save money in the long run (EL has already saved money by not maintaining the East And West Farms for the last 2.5/3.5 Years and then cutting up the East Farm for Web Life - who uses that? lol). Plus Bellsouth (before AT&T merger/buyout) tried this same exact thing with their in-house Usenet with shutting it down then hiring an outsourced provider only to bring it back in-house in under 2 Years after seeing their bandwidth costs go sky-high and customer satisfaction dropping down drastically.

It is actually cheaper to keep it in-house if Earthlink would at least keep an admin full time with a realistic yearly hardware budget which was not done after the East and West Farm were brought online in 2003. They lasted almost 2 Years (2005) before the lack of care/upkeep and missing admin showed up.

When NNTP is run in-house EL downloads from their peering partners once or twice and that is it for outside downstream bandwidth. When you outsource NNTP you end up having every single NNTP customer now bringing in that same data by themselves which drives an exponential increase in outside downstream bandwidth costs.

That is a large factor I bet is being missed.

Now if Earthlink wants to no longer package NNTP as part of the package deal, then they can drop our monthly Broadband fees to reflect that savings and then we can buy our own outside NNTP access with the money saved by the Broadband package price dropping $10.00 dollars per month. How does that sound? :-) I'm open to that.

Back in the old day, we ran innd. When the new farm was built, then we went to a commercial application so we could keep both farms in sync.

Now, with looking at the licensing fees, network costs, data center real estate, supporting (almost) obsolete hardware, we did an extended projection that does show an substantial amount of savings. The team had representatives from Network Engineering, Systems Engineering, Product Management, and Finance. I think we covered all over bases.

Granted, I'll give you that our projections are based on current utilization. So if it happens in two years that we need to reconsider to bring it back, I am hopeful that we will find the balance of doing what is right for the customer AND making sure we are spending money appropriately.

Jeff,

While it might look good on paper the new services isn't up to par with the old. It looks like it's been capped at 184 kilobits (per connection - 4 connections allowed) which is pretty pathetic.

The bandwidth limits being imposed also stunk on the old. If you want to cap users after 5 gigs or whatever 64kbps is way way way too low. Put them at 128kbps, 192kbps or something.

Although, I really like what you're trying to do NTTP on EL. EL has been pretty much dead on NTTP. Just don't assume customers are happy with the old service.

Will, you figured out the magic spot for this "alpha" phase. Don't expect this to be the same when we launch. I really intended the demonews site to be more of a taste of the retention and completeness of posts since I know that has been the biggest complaint for the longest time.

I purposely haven't been giving out all the juicy secrets for a couple of reasons. Things are still being solidified for the official release and Phase II. So let me know what you'd like to see? I won't make any promises but I do intend to listen to the customer(s).

I'll tell you right now we will probably not do a completely open pipe (at least right away). What would be a reasonable d/l speed? Four connections at 256kbps sound reasonable, (again, not making promises rather taking suggestions)?

256kbps would be a max of 321.013651 gigs/month if all 4 connections were running 24/7. Seems reasonable (that would be the most your extreme bandwidth hogs would be able to pull). Most users leave at least one slot open for headers (if they're downloading binary files).

So that would leave 240 gigs for your bandwidth hogs. If they ran 24/7 @ max speed including overhead.

So I think that would be a fine speed without caps. Especially since the overselling will greatly outnumber the bandwidth hogs.

One more thing, if you do peer with supernews (they use Cogent transit now), consider raising the cap for in-network traffic.

2629743.83 seconds in a month * 256kbps = 673214420 kilobits == 80.2534127 gigabytes * 4 == 321.013651 gigabytes.

I have been hearing all of this about newsgroups for years. Mindspring had great news servers and like a poster said before, I have found more technical help on hardware and software on Usenet than by calling tech support, reading the manual and searching on the web. Alas, all of that has been in the tank for several years now. I just don't see how outsourcing this will improve ANYTHING. All it will get us is another layer to go through when Usenet is in the toilet, and it will be. The idea of a cap is ABSURD. Your lack of effort on newsgroups and your new feeble announcement of "fixing" the service may be enough to get me to go over to the death star boys.

On Thursday, July 12th, the Comcast changeover from Time Warner took place for my area.

Since that time I have been unable to access the Earthlink Newsgroups.

Comcast refuses to resolve the problem and has stated that they do not support Earthlink. They fail to understand that I am not a Comcast Customer, but an Earthlink Customer.

The error message is:
Error reported by Server: 502 Permission Denied-Service restricted to EarthLink member networks -newssupport@EarthLink.Net [Tornado v1.0.5.360]

On Monday, July 16th, I contacted your support group and spoke to a gentleman named Chris, who represented himself as being the manager. He assured me that he understood the problem and would escalate the resolution and that I would hear from him personally by Thursday, July 19th.
Nothing has happened, no communication, no fix.

I can access the Earthlink Newsgroups from a computer at work where sbcglobal is the service provider with no problem..maybe someone at EarthLink should look thru them as this is not a new problem and has been resolved in the past.

Calls to Comcast always start with 'why are you calling Comcast? We do not support Earthlink.'

Can you help?

Hey Primo,

Sorry to hear about your troubles. From what I understand it is a common problem and may clear up for you. Ideally, you should call into Earthlink support and explain the problem to them. Either one of two things is happening based on previous issues. Either, the IP addresses you are being assigned as a result from the changeover are not in our allow list, OR the IP address you are being assigned by Comcast is not an Earthlink IP and thus preventing you from accessing our news service.

Maybe resetting your cable modem or releasing your DHCP lease via your router might force a new IP to be assigned to you, (I'm not in tech support so I am merely speculating).

As I understand it, ELNK support does have a procedure to escalate this sort of issue with the various vendors.

Regardless, with the upcoming change to the news service, this should no longer be an issue for anyone provided you use your ELNK username and password.

Help with News Group Configuration

Dear Earthlink support,

For some reason my access to the Earthlink news server is not working. I get the following message:

"A News (NNTP) error occurred: Permission Denied - Service restricted to Earthlink member networks - newssupport@EarthLink.Net (Tornado v1.0.5.360)"

The News Server (NNTP) Server Name is "news.west.earthlink.net"
Port 119 (Default)

Can you please send me the changed news server configuration, as something must have changed recently, since I was able to access the news groups before. My Internet provider was Time Warner Road Runner, which has recently been taken over by Comcast. Could this be related to that change?

Hey Mark,

The cutover happened last week. You shouldn't be getting this error anymore as long as you are using a valid elnk username/password.

256Kbps is way too slow. It's nice to now have article retention, but the download speeds have been way too throttled. Is this just temporary (until "phase II")?

I didn't find the 30GB/30-day restriction to be a problem, but throttling from byte 1 sucks. I hope this gets changed.

I am encouraged to see _something_ is being done.

When I upgraded to phone service and 8 Mb DSL from my EL 1.5 Mb service, my newsgroup access got messed up. After going around in circles with outsourced tech support, i.e., broken English telling me to try everything I've already tried, finally someone said, Oh you have to create a new email address on your account. You can use your primary EL email address to access the newsgroups anymore. It actually worked but assuming it is an actual new policy, wouldn't an email notice be nice? I'm not optimistic that the "new" service will be any better.

Why are you limiting the access so harshly? It was upto 4 connections at 30KB/s, now I read (on earthlink.support.usenet) that you're trying 2 at 60KB/s. How about going back to the old model. I don't download a lot, but when I do, I want to use the bandwidth my pipe supports. Or do something in between, but the current limits are still _way_ too slow.

I'm getting error 502 messages all the time now - either "this account is not allowed to use the news service" with news.earthlink.net or "rejected by RADIUS" with demonews.mindspring.com.
This happened on and of over the last few days but now occurs continuously.

This change has been wasteful. I have not been able to retrieve posts from news.east.earthlink.net. from west or from news.earthlink.net. No posts from the sbs or woodworking group in 3 days. A lot of smoke blowing claiming that an outside contractor will do better. At least it worked before the change done about a month ago. The chat people always claim all will be perfect in a day.

Can I get a refund off my bill every month so I can subscribe to a service to read newsgroups.

Do Earthlink people actually read this stuff. It looks like a lot of people here have some serious concerns. A little communication from our so-called Provider would be nice. I've been with Earthlink since BEFORE they started and usenet service has never sucked this bad. C'mon Earthlink, say it ain't so.

Jim, the issue could be with your news reader. Some folks have had strange problems using Outlook or Outlook express. Please visit eathlink.support.usenet for some additional info on your issue. You may just need to unsub and re-sum the groups. Our severs and Supernews servers use a different numbering scheme to keep track of the articles and groups and Outlook users seem to be the group affected.

Hey K. Festus, I think if you read the whole page you'd see that we do read this, we DID make a post BEFORE we cutover, held an alpha period and are still looking to our customers for input. We have made changes to better accommodate our users since the roll out based on their feedback.

Let me know how the service is sucking for you and I'll be happy to see what I can do to help.

Jeff

Hey Joe,

Check it out now. We made some changes. Unfortunately, we can not at this point offer un-throttled access. Maybe one day, but not now.

I just chatted with a tech??? and apparently they're still telling me that the issue is unresolved I'm using Explorer6 and either nntp.earthlink.net or news.earthlink.net with the same result of the password thing coming up incessantly. Nothing is resolved and they have no timeframe (the tech???). It's pathetic customer service at best. No customer service is more like it. I feel really stupid because this blog keeps saying to go to the newsgroup for earthlink. Hello! I can't access new messages and Google groups doesn't have that newsgroup. I guess I'm just a big ol' idiot!

Last night's chat person suggested deleting the newsgroup account. That did not help. That led me to deleting the group folders that would not update. Those two problem newsgroups seem to be working ok 20 hours later. Fingers crossed. I guess my Agent database messed up along the way.

Thanks for the follow up.

Well, those of us having this problem connecting to the news, because we use Outlook Express, also cannot connect to
earthlink.support.usenet either! Why? Because we cannot connect to the server.

I did the chat thing with earthlink rep today and was told this: 1)change the server name to nntp.earthlink.net (rather than news.earthlink.net)
I think that is misinformation.

Second, he said the problem was my broadband router, and to reset it- ???
(Why would the router have anything to do with this issue? The internet connection is working just fine.)

Please, can someone tell me what are the correct settings to use to access the usenet via earthlink if I am using OE 6.0?

Thanks!

Annie

I am having the same crappy problem. My DSL provider is EMBARQ. They are saying that EL will be charging 3.95 for a userid/password in order to get connection again. Apparently EMBARQ parted ways with EL. They will pay for up to a year. Sucks, sucks sucks

Earthlink Usenet News not working ? Have been using earthlink usenet for years with outlook. Last few days getting message 502, not authorized. Looks like earthlink server problems. Will earthlink news be up again, soon?
Thanks

i am very upset to find that i cannot connect to my groups. what am i supposed to do while y'all fiddle around with "outsourcing" options. i feel in the dark

i can't AT ALL get ANY of my Newsgroups...what happened? is news.east.earthlink.net down?

My newsgroup reader Agent has worked fine since I deleted and added back my problem groups. I had issues with two groups not getting new headers but they work great since I purge those two groups as subscribed groups and added them back. I am using nntp.earthlink.net. If you are using a pc you might try a demo of Agent to see if it is just OE that is goofed up. Maybe your OE group jammed up like it was in Agent for me. MY PC does not have OE. It has Windows Mail and I use that for a private newsgroup so I have no ideas for you OE folks. I would try unsubscribing from a group and adding it back to see if it flushes some counter or database on your computer.

I'm an Embarq customer, they're dropping the earthlink email addresses for their users. I did the 'switch' thing only to find they don't offer usenet news so I re-subscribed to earthlink (for an extra fee) now all I get is the 502 message. I've contacted online (no) support and the last rep actually suggested I recycle my dSL mode to fix the problem (which would naturally get her sorry ass of a session she had no clue how to handle). Earthlink won't be getting a dime from me and I'm gonna fill my email box to the max before they drop my account.