SprintLink US USENET Frequently Asked Questions 

 

These FAQ's are applicable to Sprintlink US customers, Sprintlink International customers please send your questions to news-admin@sprint.net

Questions

Implementation

1. What's the procedure for customers to set up a new newsfeed?
2. How do I send news back to Sprintlink?
3. Should I receive a full or partial feed?
4. Where can I download the latest active file?

Troubleshooting

1. What should I do if I have a problem with receiving a new newsfeed?
2. How to open up a trouble ticket?
3. What should I expect from the nntpTime test?

Maintenance

4. What should I do if I need to change my subscription or anything in my profile?

Misc

5. What are the fully qualified domain names (FQDN)of Sprintlink's news servers?

Implementation

1. How do I set up a newsfeed to my server? 

1. Order

The newsfeed must be ordered through your account team.

2. DNS

We require that DNS is working for your domain before we can start your newsfeed. Please make sure your DNS is working (primary and secondary servers) AND your news machine is listed properly in your DNS zone files (both forward and reverse ).

3. Your news server is up and running

Please make sure your news software is running so that we can test the connection.

4. Allow access by our news machines

A) If you are a Sprintlink customer, you will need to accept from newsfeed-east.sprintlink.net, newsfeed-west.sprintlink.net, or newsfeed-central.sprintlink.net. We will let you know what to accept from when we set up your newsfeed.

B) If you are a Nysernet customer, please accept from news.nysernet.net.

5) Send an e-mail

to news-admin@sprint.net. You will be asked preliminary questions, such as the name of your news server, which newsgroups you would like to subscribe to, contact name and e-mail address of your site. To expedite the installation, please ensure that you can telnet to your nntp port. After we receive the necessary information and we can telnet to your nntp port, we will activate your feed. It will take us 3 business days to process your request. 

2.How do I send news back to Sprintlink?

Once your feed is up and running, you will be receiving news from Sprintlink. Next step is to offer your local postings back to us so that we can send them to the rest of the Internet. If you are a Sprint customer, all such offerings should be sent to news.sprintlink.net regarless of what machine is feeding you. News.sprintlink.net is the only machine that will accept offers from Sprint customers. If you are a nysernet customer, please post to news.nysernet.net.

3. Should I receive a full or partial feed?

We will be happy to provide you will either a full or partial newsfeed. A full feed is running about 12Gigs PER DAY. If you would like a partial feed, please try and limit your list to under 100 entries by using * as wildcards where possible. For example, if I wanted alt.sports.football, alt.sports.baseball, alt.sports.hockey, etc.., I would just use alt.sports.* since that will match EVERYTHING under alt.sports.

4. Where can I download the latest active file? 

The ISC is the official maintainer for the Big-8 set of newsgroups and keeps up to date version of both active and newsgroups files. You can download them from at ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/ 

Troubleshooting

1. What should I do if I have a problem with receiving a newsfeed? 

There are some tools on the main page that you could use. You can offer a bogus article to see if Sprint sees a successful 3xx code. If we get an error, it will show up in the output (eg. 480 Not Authorized). You can also check your article stats to see if articles are being dropped before Sprint is able to offer them to your server. If there is a large number of dropped articles, that is usually an indication that your server is not able to keep up with the feed. You can also send an e-mail to news-admin@sprint.net. By ensuring that we are sending you articles that you want, you can check out your profile that we have in our database for you. Please feel free to send us any contact or subscription changes through the profile change form.

2. How to open up a trouble ticket? 

If your newsfeed is down and you are a Sprint customer, you can open up a trouble ticket by calling our trouble reporting center at 1-800-877-5045. You will need to provide your 449 address of the Sprintlink access. If your 449 address or private line number is unavailable, please contact your account team. When opening the trouble ticket, please mention that it is a newsfeed problem. For all maintenance issues, please send an e-mail to news-admin@sprint.net.

3. What should I expect from the nntpTime test?

(Modified from Cyclone documentation) The "nntpTime" utility is the single best way for us to determine how well our C yclone server and your machine are running. While times will vary depending on server load, hardware configuration and sof tware configuration, taking several measurements at different times will give you a good idea of your server's performance . In general, low double digit "nntpTimes" for all metrics is considered excellent. The "IHAVE" response time refers to th e time to perform the history lookup. The article response time is usual a direct reflection of how fast and how busy your disks are.

Maintenance

1. What should I do if I need to change my subscription or anything in my profile?;

If you see that your profile is outdated or you would like to add any changes, you can proceed to the profile change form. We will process your request as soon as possible. As there may be times where the volume of requests is high, please allow 36 hours to pass before inquiring about the request.;

Misc

1. What are the fully qualified domain names (FQDN)of Sprintlink's news servers?

newsfeed-east.sprintlink.net

news-dc-1.sprintlink.net 206.229.87.131
news-dc-2.sprintlink.net 206.229.87.2
news-pen-1.sprintlink.net 207.41.200.131
news-pen-2.sprintlink.net 207.41.200.132
news-orl-1.sprintlink.net 206.228.194.2
news-rly-1.sprintlink.net 206.228.179.131
news-atl-1.sprintlink.net 207.15.180.131

newsfeed-west.sprintlink.net

news-sea-20.sprintlink.net 207.14.7.20
news-stk-2.sprintlink.net 207.12.55.132
news-ana-7.sprintlink.net 207.13.232.7

newsfeed-central.sprintlink.net

news-chi-1.sprintlink.net 208.4.0.131
news-chi-2.sprintlink.net 208.4.0.132
news-chi-3.sprintlink.net 208.4.0.133
news-fw-12.sprintlink.net 206.61.106.12
news-fw-6.sprintlink.net 206.61.106.6
news-fw-22.sprintlink.net 206.61.106.22
news-kc-17.sprintlink.net 207.15.7.17

news.nysernet.net

news-nysernet-5.sprintlink.net 206.229.87.5
news-nysernet-15.sprintlink.net 207.41.200.15
news-nysernet-16.sprintlink.net 207.41.200.16

peer-groups

news-peer1.sprintlink.net 206.228.179.2
news-peer-east1.sprintlink.net 206.228.179.3
news-peer-west.sprintlink.net 207.12.55.133
news-mae-east.sprintlink.net 208.27.197.2

hub-groups,pull machine

news-in-east1.sprintlink.net 206.228.179.4
news-in-west.sprintlink.net 207.14.7.19
news-in-central.sprintlink.net 207.15.7.3

feed-groups

news-west.sprintlink.net 207.12.55.130
news-east1.sprintlink.net 206.228.179.6
news-central.sprintlink.net 207.15.7.2