So I finally did that $50 1TB block thing from Astraweb I've been talking
about on and off. The problem is that they had MUCH stricter password
settings (limited to 12 alphanumeric chars, despite a FAQ entry saying be
sure it's not easily guessed, thus stimulating an original password of
something like 20 chars including symbols) after I signed up than the
ones they actually let me sign up with, so I was getting invalid password
errors when I tried to actually connect.
But it took me quite some time to figure out what was going on, as I was
trying to download the group list, and pan was segfaulting on the invalid
password result, not giving it a chance to be logged or anything! Since
I don't update the group list very often, and probably others don't
either, I initially thought a segfault had either slipped into that.
But I remembered the ngrep mentioned here a few days ago and took it for
a spin, and the problem was pretty obvious when I saw the 502 invalid
password error that pan couldn't give me as it was busy segfaulting!
So, please fix the authentication so it doesn't segfault when it gets a
502 auth invalid error code. Thanks.