No reader,news.telstra.net since IP change.

[terryc]

Any chance of gettng it back?

[Klaas]

My understanding is that you'll need to get Telstra to allow the new IP range access to their news server - from what I've read in the past it was always intended to be a "bigpond customer" access thingy only, but there was broader access then that, and some IP ranges used by other ISPs could access it.

[terryc]

[quote="Klaas"]My understanding is that you'll need to get Telstra to allow the new IP range access to their news server - [/quote]

Naah, Exetel broke it.

[Dazzled]

More likely you aren't slipping under Bigpond's turnstile any more. There are plenty of other NNTP servers, even encrypted Usenet, for modest $$.

[casio7131]

astraweb has 25gb for us$10, which should last you almost indefinitely for text newsgroups. http://www.news.astraweb.com/plans.html

[Dazzled]

Giganews has a range of plans at https://secure.giganews.com/signup/ Ultralow usage is about $US 1 per Gigabyte per month. Unlimited is $US 15. I don't think Bigpond ever intended to serve non-customers.

[Bruce]

Are there any free news services similar to the one Telstra provided?

To be frank I am not sure I want to pay for newsgroups because, as Douglas Adams said, most seem to mainly attract people who normally wouldn't crawl out from under their rock. I only read about four groups and don't miss them enough to want to pay for them, Free Agent makes getting them and browsing them easy and I would like to continue using it.

regards
Bruce

[Dazzled]

Giganews will give you a free trial, and you can then get downloading. I don't entirely agree with Adams - I have read his work on news groups. But then, perhaps he had that in mind.

[Dabront]

If you only want text then there are options that can be found by googling for free news servers. This one might be suitable for you if you only wish to read or a one off small fee if you want to post;

http://www.teranews.com/

Here is a list of free trials if you want binaries;

http://www.newsgroupreviews.com/free-newsgroups.html

There are also some free servers for binaries but they are either slow or come and go. Some NNTP providers are starting to trial IPv6 and there are free servers available, this site will help you configure IPv6;

http://go6.net/

Hope this helps.

[Bruce]

Mmmmm... Thanks for the info, I only really read news groups because I got used to them when I was with Ozemail who provided them as part of their service. Some like aus.tv I abandoned because they just had too much mail to be able to keep up with and others like aus.general and aus.culture.true-blue seemed to be the home for psychopathic ratbags.

I think I will just delete Free Agent and live without them, I have yet to see anything in them worth paying for.

Thanks

Bruce

[Bruce]

Wow! I just gave Agent a last go for old times sake before deleting it - it connected and downloaded messages perhaps all is not lost.

Bruce

[neb]

My understanding is that you'll need to get Telstra to allow the new IP range access to their news server - from what I've read in the past it was always intended to be a "bigpond customer" access thingy only, but there was broader access then that, and some IP ranges used by other ISPs could access it.

The service is only available to those that obtain tel$tra wholesale transit services, however, luckily for many, they are, like in all things tel$tra, completely incompetent, and have not likely changed their IP ACL's in a decade, hence most of the early APNIC issued IP ranges will have access

[casio7131]

Are there any free news services similar to the one Telstra provided?

a bit of a late reply, but i recently started using http://www.eternal-september.org/ for text (nonbinary) newsgroups. you have to register (which is free and instant) and use a "proper" from address for your messages (but any nonspam/fake address ending in ".invalid" is acceptable, eg. nospam-for-me@example.invalid).

but the best thing is that they apply some spam filtering, so you don't see most of the spam messages that seem to be overwhelming many groups recently (i typically see 1 or 2 spams per day, while i was seeing 50-100 while i was using my paid astraweb service) - this spam filtering is what finally got me to change about 1 month ago.