Giganews a bit Wobbly,Upgrading?

[Beck38]

I'm downloading things that are 213 days old

And you apparently don't realize that EACH newsgroup is a separate entity, both in the usenet realm and the disc space it takes up on the server...??? Tell us which group that is, apparently the Giganews folks have decided that it's more important than other groups for retention.

BTW, Giganews is still skipping parts, parts that Astraweb (just to drop a name) isn't.

[SonsOfLiberty]

a.b.multimedia
a.b.tvseries
a.b.movies.divx
a.b.boneless

More?

Besides I just told you that I'm downloading post that are over 200 days old from various groups, so that answer's your question, sounds like the groups in question have drive questions and/or could be Giganews is upgrading or having server issues.

I'm not stupid....... just grabbed season 1,2,3 of BSG from there and the Scifi one too, and they were all over 200 days.

I'm sure I can dig into Newsbin's log info and grab more if I still have the data...I only failed one file and it dropped 1 .rar file out 256 .rar files. The post was merely 90 days old.

Don't forget Giganews is upgrading too...so take that into consideration. It's most likely the 'cause.

[Beck38]

Possible (the upgrading), but I've come to the conclusion is poor peering.

I used one of my old 'techniques' from back at the dawn of time (1994 or so, when I ran a usenet server plant), posting a test message on another server and seeing how long it took to propagate to Giganews.

Since I still have some leftover bits (for fills) from before I went with GN 3+ years ago, on around 3-4 servers out there, I simply sent a small message from each one of them, and then waited until it showed up on GN.

Uh.... out of the 4 messages I sent (from Astraweb, Usenet-News, and two others), five days ago, the only one to get through was from Astraweb. The message(s) came through just fine to the others (i.e., sent from Usenet-News, got 1 min. later on Astraweb). Sill waiting on GN.

I think 5 days lag time means something is wrong with the peering, not the storage.

So, I'm taking this 'opportunity' to start the process of moving to Astraweb. Their plant seems MUCH more stable, and what, I'll save %14/month? Sounds good to me. As an additional bonus, from me to the Astraweb server is only 10 hops, with an avg. delay of some 120ms, vrs. GN at 22 hops, and >300ms delay.

The Astraweb figures are very much like GN 'was' 3 years ago, when they were located in Phoenix; now that they are in the tech corridor around Hearndon, VA, the bits have to crawl across the entire continent.

So, I'll see if those test messages EVER get into GN. At 5+ days now, I doubt it. I've already sent a couple more, one of them got there, the other is like the first, 'lost in usenet space'.

[SonsOfLiberty]

Astraweb's offer won't last long, and then it goes back to normal and GN is already discussing a price drop, ya'll be mad when you switch and then GN becomes cheaper...ya ever try the 'FREE' IPv6 newsgroups? They have 100 day rentition and it's free.

[ericab]

Astraweb's offer won't last long, and then it goes back to normal and GN is already discussing a price drop, ya'll be mad when you switch and then GN becomes cheaper...ya ever try the 'FREE' IPv6 newsgroups? They have 100 day rentition and it's free.

which ipv6 newsserver are you talking about ?
only one i know of is eweka.nl

[Beck38]

Astraweb's offer won't last long, and then it goes back to normal and GN is already discussing a price drop, ya'll be mad when you switch and then GN becomes cheaper..

WRONG. The $11 price (as listed here) is FOREVER, a LOCKED IN PRICE as long as you maintain the account. So GN will have to drop a LONG ways to compete, and then you'll still have problems with them.

I'll drop my GN account down to 2G/month level (a couple bucks a month) for a couple months when I drop it down, simply to see if they do get any better, or get worse. Then I'll 'plug and abandon' the account.

[SonsOfLiberty]

Astraweb's offer won't last long, and then it goes back to normal and GN is already discussing a price drop, ya'll be mad when you switch and then GN becomes cheaper..

WRONG. The $11 price (as listed here) is FOREVER, a LOCKED IN PRICE as long as you maintain the account. So GN will have to drop a LONG ways to compete, and then you'll still have problems with them.

I'll drop my GN account down to 2G/month level (a couple bucks a month) for a couple months when I drop it down, simply to see if they do get any better, or get worse. Then I'll 'plug and abandon' the account.

So you paying for 2 accoutns?

eweka.nl yes. and xsnews.nl I think there are others.

[EyeBaller]

Astraweb's offer won't last long, and then it goes back to normal and GN is already discussing a price drop, ya'll be mad when you switch and then GN becomes cheaper...ya ever try the 'FREE' IPv6 newsgroups? They have 100 day rentition and it's free.

WRONG. The $11 price (as listed here) is FOREVER, a LOCKED IN PRICE as long as you maintain the account. So GN will have to drop a LONG ways to compete, and then you'll still have problems with them.

I'll drop my GN account down to 2G/month level (a couple bucks a month) for a couple months when I drop it down, simply to see if they do get any better, or get worse. Then I'll 'plug and abandon' the account.

The sign up for the Astraweb is limited, we don't know when they'll pull the chance to sign up for the $11 a month offer. But those who are signed up, have it for life.

I don't know why you'd be mad to switch to Astraweb then switch back if GN drop their price, it's a little inconvenient but not that big a deal...

The 3gb/month GN acct only has 30 days retention.. which is ok if you just want to use it to check for peering, but not if you want to be able to get fills... (I'm sure you knew that already Beck38 )

[SonsOfLiberty]

I really like Giga that's all, never failed me, the price is kind of the break point though, so Astraweb looks like a good alternative, but from user comments it seems there both great but giga is expensive.

[Beck38]

I don't know why you'd be mad to switch to Astraweb then switch back if GN drop their price, it's a little inconvenient but not that big a deal...

For years and years, I had a nice account with a bay area company that worked out fine, until these massive dvd postings started eating up retention space. Then I had the multiple block accounts chasing fills and such, got to be a real drag....

So I 'bit the bullet' and paid GN the $25/month, starting a bit over 3 years ago. Didn't look back.

Then, about 6-8 months ago, I started getting 'message not found' errors on nzb's that were d/l'ed from Newzbin; now, I simply went back to the Newzbin entry, and saw that, according to them, all the files/parts had been verified. Hmmm.

So, I went a took a look at some of those old block accounts, and lo and behold, the 'missing' GN parts were there! I d/l'ed a few to make absolutely sure, and yep, they were, my newsreader wasn't lying to me.

Then, the problems slowly went away... took a couple days, but those missing parts on GN 'showed up'.

This has happend about 1-2 times a month ever since, This last time, I was blithely going along, minding my own business, keeping my d/l'ing around 400MB/month, when yet again, tons of 'message not found'.

Well, it's pure aggravation. Aggravation, I might add, I'm paying a (ever increasing) premium price for.

So, tonight, I did some tests with Astraweb, and found that their throughput (with those 20 connections) is just about 2-3 times faster than Giganews is. The three times faster ms ping times, and half the route hops, REALLY makes them faster rather than the 3500 miles cross country trip to Giganews.

So, yes, I'll keep the Giganews account as it is for a week or so, before tearing it down. I'll stomp on the hammer on Astraweb and see how it goes.