RE Bigpond news server

It doesn't do Binaries if I remember correctly, so if you're looking for those you'll have to subscribe to a news server that does. Either that or change your ISP, but given that Usenet is close to dead these days anyway I would doubt if any of them would carry a feed within 12 months.

Without any competition to measure against you can't tell if the service was good or not. It just *was*.

They used to do some dumb shit in those days too though, like tell you that you could only have your phone in a certain part of the house and make you wait 37 years for a connection.

That was the height of their "good service". Whenever a new housing estate was opened up they wouldn't waste money running in new phone cables as a matter of course. They'd wait until the houses were built and people moved in and applied for a connection so they could come out and rip the shit out of all the brand new roads and footpaths.

Oh yeah. Great service :)

Let go and let some blood flow through before it drops off.

English is new to you, huh?

ping won't tell you much. a server can be up an not respond to pings.

run a traceroute, on port 119 if possible.

when I do it I get as far as bundle-ether1.win18.melbourne.telstra.net (203.50.6.114) and then appear to hit a firewall, but I'm not on a telstra network so that's no surprise.

Back when it was Telecom, perhaps, but definitely when it was just a part of the PMG.

Cheers, Gary B-)

From memory we ordered our land line before the house was finished so didn't have to wait long after we moved in, that was Dec 1978 and we still have the same phone number.

Daryl

Hey All,

Yes, it seems there are some issues with news.bigpond.com.

I had used it exclusively through outlook express / Windows live mail since the mid 90's, mainly for text newsgroup "forums" & the occasional binary download.....

It had become notoriously unreliable in the past 12 months or so, and after some frustrating phone calls with numerous Telstra "techs" I finally got on to a fellow who knew what the hell I was talking about who was a great help in getting the service going again (He has now moved on)

Then for last few months where the service strangely started alternating between working on my work comp -(W7 - WLM) and home Computer - (XP - OLE) - Yes, it would work on one comp, but not the other ... very strange...

Until now, when it doesn't work at all on either machine

I have now changed to a free server : news.aioe.org which I believe does not support binaries and is apparently slow, but as I only browse a few text based newsgroup "forums" these days, it seems to suit my need, and works on both machines...

Cheers,

Gary

Brisbane Queensland Australia

You really are a fckwitt , we all know JH's response was to solve the massive debt Keating created , another labor fskup

Yep,..it's recent recall that starts to go,.with age apparently :-(

Jason

LIFO

Yep,..it's recent recall that starts to go,.with age apparently :-(

____________________________________________

Are you sure? I think I read an article on it yesterday

:-)

This is just flat out wrong. Most servers will drop IGMP packets (PING requests) its means nothing. And before you say it, trace route uses IGMP and will also drop the packets despite recording the first few hops.

The only way to know if the server is alive is to telnet. Open command prompt and type, "telnet news.bigpond.com 119" no quotes.

If the screen goes blank the server is listening to port 119 (news default port). If you are on windows 7 you might see telnet is not a recognised program/batch blah blah. In Control Panel, Programs and Features, Turn Windows Features on or off. Select Telnet Client, ensure it is ticked.

This will only work for Telstra customers as all traffic originating outside of their network, aimed at the server, will automatically be rejected.

It says could not open connection to the host on port 119 Presumably this means it is not working but would it not also mean that it exists but not working as I assumed when I pinged it

Read what I wrote again, after Telecom Australia and OTC were merged, *long* after PMG was split.

Trevor.

What has competition got to do with service? It can make it better sometimes, or worse in many other cases. Especially when private profit is the sole consideration.

Trevor.

So what, not as much revenue either. As service demand increases, and revenue increases, the support staff used to increase as necessary. Only now they don't :-(

Trevor.

install a home-phone. They dug a trench diagonally across my front yard. Failed to fill it properly, so I got bogged in my own frontyard

An when we had ours installed back then they did a great job, even put down top soil and planted new lawn seed after they filled in the trench! As always depends on the people.

Trevor.