Re: [Pan-users] 502 rejected by RADIUS: (no message)

[Kourosh Ghassemieh]

Paul J. Dudley wrote:
> Hello,
>  
> [ Pan 0.14.2.91 ]
> I'm getting an error when trying to access newsgroups:
> 
> default handshake failed: 502 rejected by RADIUS: (no message)
> 
> Everything worked ok up until last night. This morning is when the error
> started.
> I've made no changes to my setup(s).
> So I then booted up win2k and got the same error no matter which reader
> I tried.
> I got into contact with Earthlink right away and was on the phone or
> chat with
> them until 5:00ish ( 11:00 - 5:00 ). They could find nothing wrong and
> weren't
> even familiar with this error message. And this was their so called
> experts.
> 
>  Can someone explain what this means and what I need to do ?
> 
>  advTHANKSance
> 
>  Paul

Hi Paul,

It's likely a problem with the news servers being unable to authenticate
your username/password against a Radius server [1].

>From this page, it appears that Earthlink has outsourced it's news
services, http://blogs.earthlink.net/2007/07/usenet_revisited.php.  If
that's that case, then the news service is likely trying to authenticate
your login info and failing.  Now, whether they're authenticating
against Earthlink's servers or their own servers that replicate from
Earthlink's, I don't know.

However, it does appear that the problem is on _their_ end, with their
being either Earthlink or the news provider.

It's also possible that you hit a hard download cap and your news
account has been locked out.

Are you _sure_nothing had changed?  Has your Earthlink password been
changed?  Can you still access e-mail using the same password?  If the
password is the same, you can try setting up the server again in Pan,
just to double check that it's not a corrupt profile.  Back up your
entire .pan directory and then delete it.  Again MAKE SURE YOU BACK UP
FIRST!  Re-create your server profile using your username and password
and try to access your newsgroups.  If you can, then it's possible it's
a corrupt profile and you'll need to fix that.  If it still doesn't
work, you'll have to track it down.

Some things to ask Earthlink:  Do they outsource news and how is
authentication handled?  Does the news server authenticate off
Earthlink's servers or their own?  Is there a hard cap for downloads?
What happens if download limits are exceeded?

Your other option is to go with a premium news service such as Giganews.
 In fact, some ISPs have outsourced their news to Giganews (Time Warner,
nee Adelphia comes to mind).  I've been with Giganews and haven't had
any problems.  Another plus is that they now support ssl so you don't
have to worry about your ISP trying to sniff your news traffic looking
for copyright violations or throttling.

Hope this helps,

Kourosh


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radius_server