November 7 2002 - Usenet News Server Problems

The news server went down on Saturday November 2nd and has been unavailable for much of the time since. The server was back up much of the day on the 6th but, as of 7:30am on the 7th, it is back down again. When the server is available, there are still two major problems. Both of these problems may result in you not being able to see any new postings in a group or, perhaps, just not be able to see certain postings made before the recent outages.

1. Article Renumbering - Usenet servers identify articles by what are called article numbers. These numbers are used by news readers to keep track of the articles that you have already read. Unfortunately, the news server problems resulted in article numbers being reset. When the articles numbers get reset, this causes new articles to be assigned old numbers and your news reader may not show them to you, thinking that you have already read them. Most news reader programs have an option that lets you see all articles (both read and unread) in the group or you may have to unsubscribe to the groups and then resubscribe to reset the articles numbers. If you use a mail reader on a unix system that uses your .newsrc file (such as trn, pine, or tin) you can reset all the newsgroups by running resetnewsrc.

2. Missing Articles - Many newsgroups are missing the articles posted after September 14th. The UITS ithelp notices page from 11/6/2002 said:

   The IU Usenet newsgroup server was experiencing difficulties. Connections may have been refused or timing out. System administrators restored service 10:00am, however, archived messages posted after 9/14 may not be available. System administrators are working to restore these postings. If messages are immediately required for academic purposes, please contact the UITS Support Center at 855-6789.

   So, if you want to contact UITS about the status of missing articles you should call 855-6789.

   Also note that we maintain a local archive of the cs.* and ac.csci.* hierarcies. We pull the articles down on the first of each month, so the articles up to November 1st should be there. You can find this archive in /l/newsarchive on the CS systems. There is a directory structure that mirrors the newsgroup names so, for example, ac.csci.c123 would be in:

   /l/newsarchive/ac/csci/c123

   If you actually want these articles back on the news server your best bet is to follow the instructions above and contact UITS.

Please let us know if you have additional questions or problems with news or contact UITS directly at 855-6789.

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