News server losing bodies

[mattc]

Guys,

The news server (news.swiftdsl.com.au) is grabbing the headers, but no message bodies. This is getting a bit out of control...

m.

[Phil.Pierotti]

Never before have I been so glad to see a post.

And here I was thinking[list=a] My senility has finally kicked in
I've tweaked my computer once too often
My NewsReader is just a piece of crap
It's been too long between visits back to the news server
[/list=a]Now it looks like it's not just me.

[mattc]

It also seems as though it's only been a problem in the last two weeks...it was OK before then..

[Phil.Pierotti]

Yes, definately this week, and (from memory) last week as well. Prior to that I'd had no problems with the news servers.

Thing is, I'm not seeing this with ALL messages. The most recently posted (n, varies) in any newsgroup work fine - ie I receive both headers and bodies.

Could this possibly be a configuration thing? eg "when (disk full) discard bodies but retain headers"

[ngapali]

Last week was when I first noted the problem, and posted below.

It seems to be ignored as a number of people have commented but nothing from Swiftel.

It appears to occur in the second half four. I am wondering if it is something similar in type to the sydney problem.

It would be nice to here something is occuring................

I would use the sydney server instead but the delay is still too long for my liking.

[Phil.Pierotti]

ok, so here's some real numbers.

Earlier this afternoon I connected to the server , sync'd up any messages, and cleared them all (mark newsgroup as read) from my local client.

Now (10:30pm Sydney) I reconnect and get all the articles.

In (for example) aus.photo I now see: (ie unread messages since I last sync'd)

Number of Headers? 35 (earliest is 2:57pm)
Number of Headers with Bodies? 2

ForumAdmin / SysAdmin ?? Feel free to jump in any time and contribute?

[PT_Richard]

Hi,

Yes the Perth server has not been syncing header / body's

I'm currently expireing all those miss linked articles so fingers crossed.

This normally runs at 1am Sunday...

Richard

[Zar]

Still no bodies to all messages on any newsgroup..

I have been using newsgroups.. aka bulletin boards since too long to remember.. come on, it maybe the part of the net that some/most don't know about or would like to forget about, but for alot of us, it is a pivotal point in our daily internet traffic, work!, and entertainment.
One main reason I left Telstra was their inability to run a functional news-server, please lets see some improvement in this area.

[PT_Richard]

Hi,

Please use news.syd.swiftdsl.com.au

Richard

[Sykdup]

Is the Sydney server still a couple of hours behind in receiving new posts? This is also quite annoying.

[PT_Richard]

Hi,

Sydney is Fed from Sprint, I will talk to them today about this.

What news groups should we remove to reduce the feed ?

Richard

[Phil.Pierotti]

What are SwiftDSL already including/excluding on their feed?

For a start I'm sure there's much in (for example) ALT.BINARIES that can reasonably be trimmed (eg as part of a "this is a free service, so we make an effort to exclude the bloat - if you're looking for pr0n, or want to L33ch W@r3z, go elsewhere" policy)

Do you have any stats you could make available on the top N newsgroups either by bits or by posts?

[Dirge]

A lot of the alt groups would attract little, if any, interest in Australia. For example, looking through the news groups currently on the Sydney server -

alt.12step.cuckold.jaime-de-castellvi
alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk.flonk.flonk
alt.2many.canadians.not-enough.backbacon

etc. etc.

I doubt that groups such as the above would attract much local interest and could be safely excluded as could many of the binaries groups. If someone wants one of these groups back, they can always ask.

[Diag]

Maybe you could post a list of the newsgroups that generate the most traffic/bandwidth/storage and let people nominate which newgroups they actually read. Remove anything that gets no votes. You can always add them back in if someone asks for them. I'd guess most people who are heavy users of the news server are watching these forums.

[PT_Richard]

Sounds reasonable to me

[Zar]

I also vote for this idea
one thing tho, if a group gets requested, lets have a decent timeout also like 30-60 days, then if no activity has been produced, remove the group, that'l stop stagnet requests and wasted resources on groups that get requested then they 'all of suden' decide they don't need them =)

edit: i slightly missed the voting point of the above,above post.. but still relevant (maybe) lol