'Off The Rails' Event Being Monitored, Appears Some Peering Is Creating 'Skips'

[Beck38]

I monitor three major newsgroup providers (Astraweb, Giganews, and Blocknews), both Us and Eu servers, and although things have been going very well the past 2-3 months with no major 'skip' (or 'fade') events, starting about some 12 hours ago I noticed things were getting... well, a bit off.

Right now, Astraweb/EU is skipping tons of parts posted in the last 24 hours, as is Blocknews/US and /EU, but neither Astraweb/US, or either of the Giganews (US or EU) have suffered any (as far as I can tell). Somewhat obviously, it appears that however (or whomever) Blocknews and Astraweb/EU are peering from, is giving them the problems.

If it continues for another 12 hours or so, and doesn't appear to be 'filling in' the skipped of missing parts, I'll do some more research and try and nail which provider is causing the skipping/Fading.

Sometimes the peering, if done properly at the server, will 'fix' this, but this is the first time in probably 6 months that I've seen multiple server plants be affected all at once, while others don't seem to be at all.

Just a heads up, if you try d/l'ing anything posted during this time-frame, you may have serious problems with missing parts that may or may not be 'fixable' with the pars as the amount of missing blocks may well exceed the available pars.

[Tokeman]

Hopefully they sort it out soon. I'm on astraweb, and in the us, but when I connect to the SSL server (ssl-us.astraweb.com) it always ends up connecting to a EU server for some reason... Also using blocknews for my backup :\
Thanks for the info. Keep us posted!

[Hypatia]

Astraweb has that sort of problems on EU server from time to time.. US works fine in this case

PS it seems it got fixed...

[Tokeman]

Anyone know why my US SSL server address (ssl-us.astraweb.com) always ends up going to EU when it connects?
Thinking about mailing support, but figured some one here may know.

[Hypatia]

tobh i have no idea. ive just made tracert and i have different routes to EU\US servers, and different IP addresses. What does yours show?
did you try to use servers IP address instead of "ssl-us.astraweb.com" ?
there are quite a few..

[Beck38]

AT just around 24hours since the initial discovery of problems, most (but not all) of the monitored servers have recovered. A bit of what I have discovered:

Giganews/Us and EU, plus Astraweb/US, suffered zero problems.

Blocknews/US had gaps about as severe as anyone, but recovered fairly quickly.

Both Blocknews/EU and Astraweb/EU still have major gaps that have not filled in as of yet at the 24hour plus point.

All servers that suffered gaps were utilizing Newshosting as their primary or secondary peer. What was interesting was the fairly rapid recovery of Blocknews/US, and it appears that they utilize several primary peers, that enables them to fairly rapidly recover from any peer that 'goes off the tracks' extensively. Exactly why their EU server doesn't do the same... They may be contracting out that portion of their system, and the operators of that haven't programed it up to the same level as their US server.

Similar things may be going on with Astraweb/EU. I'll continue to monitor over the next couple of days.

Once again, this shows that if one is to put a secondary server into ones binary d/l'er, the secondary selection is to put the US or EU server (opposite of your primary) as your first choice (costs nothing of course). The operators SHOULD have those two 'locked' together, where each is the primary peer of the other; but obviously that is not the case.

Except with Giganews; I can think of some drawbacks to peering each plant to the other, and in the past (in fact, the last major 'event' 6 months ago was Giganews related) and the gap then never (monitored for 2+ weeks) recovered, but what was most interesting was how fast Blocknews/US seemed to recover from the 'hole'.

I'll see if those two servers lagging in filling up ever manage to recover in the next couple of days.

[Hypatia]

to be honest i had the impresison that astrawebs' "main" server is EU(both general news.astraweb.com +eu.news.astraweb.com are in Europe
). And i think i wont be mistaken if say that majority of people consider AW mostly a european provider.
That is why i find the problems they have from time to time on EU \general server kinda surprising..

[Beck38]

Yep as to Astraweb/EU supposedly being the 'main'/primary; maybe they simply hired a crew to do the San Jose plant are 'on the ball' more.

Since I used to live right down the road (okay, a a few miles) from where they're physically located, one would think the technical ability of folks walking down the street are 'above normal'. But who knows. Again, I'll continue to monitor for a few days as usual.

[mesaman]

Anyone know why my US SSL server address (ssl-us.astraweb.com) always ends up going to EU when it connects?
Thinking about mailing support, but figured some one here may know.

I think you're looking at a list of message-ID's for the post you're downloading. It's a common misconception, if you're using a newsreader that shows the message-ID's you're downloading, to think you're connected to the server that appears in the message-ID's.

[Tokeman]

I think you're right mesaman.