Help my Isp made yarn useless
From: John (sprage@ibm.net)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 1997 01:36:20 -0500
My isp, ibm.net recently changed their newsservers so that only 2
connections are possible. I wasn't sure what that meant until today.
I can no longer use Yarn for os/2 and vsoup with 10 threads. If I
do, the first two threads start on the first two newsgroups in my
newsrc file and the remaining 8 threads get an error message saying
to unselect group manually - no reply. The newsgroups are there,
it's just that the newsserver is ignoring the 8 threads. This
really messes up things for me as Yarn used to zip through the
newsgroups, and if one newsgroup had a lot of posts, it didn't
matter, one thread would work on it and the rest would go on to the
next newsgroups until it reached 2meg and then it would stop. Now,
I can't do this. I have changed the -t option for vsoup to 2 and I
no longer get that error message, however if one of the newsgroups
has a lot of posts it ties up one thread until the max packet size
is reached. The remaining thread continues on, but the efficiency is
terribly reduced as the old way would have 9 threads going on and
zipping though the headers and not downloading the ones that my
score file said not to, and downloading the ones I wanted.
As a result, I always got posts in all my newsgroups. Now I don't
because as happened tonight two newsgroups had a lot of posts, and
that tied up both threads.
A while back someone was having problems with their isp's
newsservers, and someone understood what the problem was and
suggested that they ask their isp if the isp was using news software
that was RFC ??? compliant. Is there anything applicable in this
case that I might ask ibm?
I already know why they did this, a note was sent that 2% of the
users were using more than 2 connections and were using 16% of the
system resources. But I can't imagine how this change will have
helped, won't those people have to stay on line longer? The only
solution I have now is to set the max size limit to something like 5
or 6 meg, and let Yarn go at it after I go to bed, but this will
mean being online for several hours as opposed to being online for 5
minutes several times a day, just to deal with the high traffic
newsgroups. I used to run a catch-up about once a week immediatly
after a "get news"
I am going to send ibm an email explaining why I am unhappy with the
change, and if anyone can give me any ideas to mention in the email
it would be very helpful. I realize that big blue isn't going to
change back to the way it was before just because I am upset, but
I'm going to tell them anyway. The have ruined the functionality of
my news client, and I'm really sad about it.