FAQ - Rover Won't Connect to my News Server
Here are the most likely causes of connection failures:
1. The server might be down. If you have been able to connect to it in the past,
this is the most likely cause.
In that case, you need to check with the company that runs the
news server.
2. You may have specified the wrong address for your news server
on the Configure/Server screen in News Rover.
Typically, the name of the news server has the form news.server.com
where "server.com" is the name of your news server.
However, a lot of news servers use other addresses such as
news-central.giganews.com. You need to check with your news server company
and find out for sure what address to specify.
Some news providers have more than one news server, for example,
east.UsenetServer.com and west.Usenetserver.com.
If more than one server is available, try connecting to each one.
One way to check to see if you have a valid address is to get to the
Command Prompt in Windows and then type the following command:
PING address
Where address is the address for the news server.
For example:
PING news.giganews.com
PING will tell you if it can establish a connection.
An even better test is to type:
TELNET address 119
and see if you get a greeting from the news server.
3. If you have a hardware or software firewall program, it may be blocking
your access. Try temporarily turning off your firewall and see if that
enables the connection. Firewall programs such as ZoneAlarm, BlackICE
and Norton Personal Firewall block outgoing connections as well as
incoming. News Rover does not accept any incoming connections,
but you must configure your firewall to allow News Rover to make outgoing
connections to the following ports: 25, 26, 80, 110, 119 and 7520.
If the connection problem started when you installed a News Rover upgrade,
then the problem is almost certainly due to a firewall program.
Firewall programs do not realize that the new NewsRover.exe file is an upgrade;
they consider it to be a new, unknown and potentially dangerous program
that must be blocked until you configure the firewall to allow it to connect.
A couple of customers have reported that their firewall software did not
allow News Rover to connect even after they turned it off.
They had to turn it back on and then configure it to allow NewsRover.exe
to make outgoing connections.
4. Your news server might block connections that do not come
from specific customer addresses. Many dial-up ISP's have their news
servers configured so that only customers connecting through
their dial-up lines can access their news server.
5. Your news server might be down. If an alternate server is available,
try it.
6. There is a slight chance that the entry for your news server in the
News Rover configuration file has gotten corrupted. The only way to
check for this is to go into the Configure/Server screen and remove
the entry for your news server. Then exit News Rover, restart it and
reenter the news server entry. NOTE: Doing this will remove all
subscribed newsgroups and downloaded messages and files for
that news server.
7. If you can connect to the news server sometimes, but get
connection failure messages occasionally when downloading,
you may have the maximum connection limit for your server set to high.
Go to the Configure/Server screen and reduce the connection limits for
the server near the bottom of that screen.
If you wish, you can use the method described below to capture an event log
of the failure and then send it to us for analysis.
To create an event log file, go to the Configure/Advanced screen and
click two checkboxes: "Write event log to disk file" and
"Log all server I/O communications".
You will get warnings about the settings being temporary, this is normal
and you can ignore them. If you are using the password protection option,
you must be in privileged mode to make these settings.
Then run News Rover long enough to cause the problem to occur.
Once this happens, stop News Rover (using the normal methods) as soon
as possible to keep the size of the event log as small as possible.
After you exit from News Rover, go to the directory where
News Rover is installed (normally c:\Program files\Newsrover\),
and look for a file named Event.log. Send this file to us as
an attachment to an e-mail message.
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