virmin media and alt.binaries.teevee

[sadsack]

Hi chaps...
Just wondered if any of you VM users out there are having trouble scraping headers from a.b.teevee.... as all I seem to be getting lately is the following message:

02:00:19 Error @ news.virginmedia.com. Unable to Enter Group "alt.binaries.teevee". (411 No Such Group). (BS:5)

Strange as I decided to d/l a file from a.b.teevee as a test from fst.... and although it was throwing up some weird errors it was still downloading...

This has only happened in the last week.
So I tried the "fetch entire group list" using vm as sourse and a.b.teevee was listed.... and I could see that I was still subbed to the group.... but cannot fetch any headers... even though I know there must be some there as I havent scrapped for over a week.

Any ideas chaps... appreciate any replies... cheers..
sadsack

[NNTP]

news.virginmedia.com is just an alias for one of the Highwinds backends which maintain a unified header view (including errors) across all systems. On friday starting around 18:00 UTC the Highwinds servers malfunctioned, returning "411 no such group" when issuing the GROUP command for a.b.teevee and maybe others as well. Nevertheless, the articles were still coming in, so users relying on nzb files didn't even notice. On saturday the problem got resolved. There were again some hiccups on sunday between 01:00 and 02:00 UTC which you managed to detect :-)

In theory you could pull headers from another provider, but unfortunately Highwinds is the only source of headers I know that is affordable, reliable (mostly) and supports compression.