Failed downloads

[spliff99]

Recently, the last week or two, a lot of downloads have been failing to extract - saying not enough blocks to repair : have 0 need: 250, or some number like that.

This used to happen occasionally and it was usually due to a bad upload, but now it's happening about 50% of the time.

My provider is astraweb, is anyone else experiencing similarly high failure rates with astraweb or any other provider recently?

Thanks

[inpheaux]

My provider is astraweb, is anyone else experiencing similarly high failure rates with astraweb or any other provider recently?

I've been hearing this complaint very often from Astraweb users in recent weeks. It seems their completion has gotten really unbearable recently. For every single report I've seen people complain about I've been able to both confirm it's really broken on Astraweb and that it's perfectly fine on Giganews.

It may very well be time to consider jumping ship to another host, at which point, I strongly endorse Giganews or anything based off the Giganews feed like Supernews. While we of course would be thrilled if you used the referral codes we have for Giganews/Supernews, Supernews also has a special plan for $9.99/mo.

The only downside to Supernews compared to Astraweb is that with Supernews you're presently capped to 350 days of retention (Though I have been assured that this will periodically be increased to stay competitive, though it will always significantly lag behind whatever retention Giganews offers). However, even though it has capped retention, you can be rather certain that anything within those 350 days will actually be there, something you can't say for Astraweb right now.

[paddy29]

I have been having the exact same issue with them. I didn't want to jump ship as they are so cheap.

What I did was subscribe to blocknews, you can buy 5GB for $2.75 and it doesn't expire so you can take as long as you need. I then used Sabnzbd to set it as a backup server.

The thing is since I did this I have had not one failed download and most don't need repaired. Also I have used 0.15103GB of my 5GB allowance since the 1st Dec. I have downloaded around a TB from astraweb in that time so it shows you how little of the data astraweb is missing.

[dalek]

spliff99, forgive me if this is obvious, but  did you add a backup-server? I had some trouble with Astraweb and it nearly went away after
adding their EU-server as a backup. Also, if all blocks are missing it could be that a file hasn't been joined.

[merriweather]

so i've just gotten this problem for the first time...


is the only solution to try again from the start with a couple of backup servers enabled?  i'm assuming it's not a bad upload since it's been there for 280 days and has had 50+ snatches...


my net's been dropping in and out lately, is that likely to cause problems?  apologies, i'm new to usenet.

[pobox]

Astraweb seems to have fixed their completion issues.

[inpheaux]

Astraweb seems to have fixed their completion issues.

I can confirm this. It must have happened in the past ~12 hours or so. I verified someone's broken post at 0430 and when I re-tried at around 2100 it worked. I've also gone back and re-downloaded various other reports people brought to me as broken, and they seem to be alright now too.

It's not 100% yet, though. I'm still getting a bunch of missing article errors with Astraweb, while the posts are perfectly fine on Giganews and pass QuickCheck. But at least now Astraweb has enough data to repair.

While it's nowhere near as bad as it was, this problem and the lack of communication from Astraweb regarding what the hell is going on doesn't instill a lot of confidence in me. And since they're not the only super cheap plan on the block anymore, it's probably still worthwhile to consider other options, like Supernews, UNS and Blocknews.

[young-einstein]

While it's nowhere near as bad as it was, this problem and the lack of communication from Astraweb regarding what the hell is going on doesn't instill a lot of confidence in me.

Yep ... that's what really bugs me as well.  I've recently ditched Astraweb and moved to another Usenet provider, and I haven't encountered a single problem since I made the switch.  It's a bit of a shame, because I'd been using Astraweb for a long time prior to these problems.