Gnus problems

[Tim X]

Hi All,

my ISP has recently changed their news server and now I cannot get
gnus to work. I've tried both the gnus which comes with emacs 21.4 and
with the later 'No Gnus v0.4'. This is all on a debian etch (testing)
system. Prior to the ISP changing news server, all worked fine. I
believe previously they were running dnews. Now I'm not sure, but have
noticed the real name of the news server is now pnews, so its possible
they are running pnews. 

I have totally stripped out all my previous gnus configuration
settings and removed ~/News, .newsrc and .newsrc.eld. So essentially,
starting with a clean slate.

The problem is with the 'native' default method. This is set to (nntp
"news.internode.on.net") 

When I start gnus, it fetches the active file from the remote news
server no problems. However, there are no zombie or killed groups as
the manual indicates should be the case. It appears gnus is unable to
determine new groups. I can subscribe to a group using U and entering
the group name. Gnus is aware of the group and can even perform
auto-completion of the name when I hit tab. However, once I've
subscribed to the group, hitting g to get new news tells me there is
no new news. I know this is incorrect as the groups I've tried to
subscribe to have reasonably high numbers of posts and as this is a
first time subscription, the norm would be to be told there are in
fact thousands of unread 'new' news articles in the group. 

Then it gets weirder - if I hit M-g to check for new news just for a
single group, it comes back and lists all the available unread items
in that group. So, M-g works, but g does not. 

If I subscribe to the same group using the foreign group add function
G m, the group is subscribed and when I hit g, it tells me how many
unread articles are available. This is subscribing to the group using
my ISPs news server as the foreign server. So, effectively, its using
the same method (i.e. (nntp "news.internode.on.net") as my 'native'
default method set in gnus-select-method. 

So, what I'm trying to work out is why the native method is unable to
get the list of available articles when using g. I've checked things
like group levels and default select level and all seems good (defult
is 3 for subscribed groups and 4 for default select). I've even tried
using g with a C-u arguement of 4 and greater, but no diffeence. 

Anywone come across anything similar or have any hints on where I can
search for some clues?

TIA

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au