newsbin.com

Hi All
Is there an age limit on Virginmedia/NTL
I seem to have no problem downloading anything 12 days or younger
Anything older and I get a "Article not found"


Many thanks in advance

That's fairly normal for ISP servers. 12 days isn't really that bad for free. Pay servers go back in time up to 240 days.

its normally 7 days for the VM server

Topic belongs in News Servers but is in PowerUsenet.

There are a ton of news server names which all resolve to 69.16.176.253
This is the giant newsfarm.ams2.highwinds-media.com

Some of the names are:

eu.usenet-news.net
news.eu.ngroups.net
eunews.blocknews.net
euro.usenetvault.com
newsfarm.ams.shemes.com
...and...
news.virginmedia.com

Yes, VM/NTL outsources newsgroups to that same big Ams. newsfarm of Highwinds.

There are probably many more names for 69.16.176.253 that I don't know about.

When I log into the server with my usenet-news.net account, the retention is much longer; and by NZB's it can be as long as 120 days.

So it must be that there was an option for the Virginmedia ISP to purchase a level of service from Highwinds that includes a specific retention for that ISP. The server detects a VM/NTL IP address and without a login the server behaves differently. How can you otherwise explain the different retention times for the same server?

blackbacks and richy99 don't say if they are measuring retention by headers or by NZB retrievals.

7 days by headers and nzb, some groups seem go go back further but the general rule is 7 days

there is no additional service to purchase a higher account as it is a free service provided by the ISP, the ISP probably sets a rule that the NSP sets up for people logging in from different IP ranges, it detects a VM IP address (you do not need to log into the server as authentication is done via IP) and gives that config file that is asked for, different accounts get different permissions i would have thought

I'm with Virginmedia and use their news server for most of my downloading but also subscribe to Easynews and use there European news servers as a fill server. I never reach the download limit on Easynews so the total builds up over time - when Virginmedia starts getting slow at peak times I uncheck the fill server option on the Easynews server and get the download speed back up.

Virginmedia are supposed to announce the start of a 50meg download speed today using docsis3 - it'll be interesting to see what happens to the speeds at peak times as the new service is rolled out over the network.

speeds for 10 and 20 should get better if you are in an oversubscribed area as it is on a completely different network what is in use now