gnus error on news.motzarella.org: "Couldn't enter <group>"

[Gernot Hassenpflug]

Hello all,

After the demise of my university newsserver and the lack of European
groups at my current work's server, I applied to motzarella.org for a
free text-groups news access, which I was granted, thanks a lot to
those fine folks.

I'm using Debian GNU/linux unstable with the standard Emacs21.4, as
well as the snapshots for X11 and GTK. All behave similarly in the
following case.

All seemed to be going well, but I noticed that one group kept giving
me trouble:

rec.aviation.military always had 0 articles, and I could not enter it
from the server buffer (below the output from *Messages*):

...
Retrieving newsgroup: rec.aviation.military...
Can't select group
Retrieving newsgroup: rec.aviation.military...
Can't select group
...

The odd thing is that the group is perfectly available under
Netscape/Mozilla's derivative newsreaders.

A search of this group on Google brought up nothing on the error
message in the first ten pages. Hence my question to the group.

I thought perhaps it is owing to some limitation of the number of
articles gnus can handle, since there are some 5 million or so article
numbers to initially filter (most expired I suspect). I have no
trouble with such large groups as comp.text.tex though, so I am a bit
stumped.

If anyone has pointers, please let me know (if someone has an account
with motzarella please try and let me know the result. The admins seem
to be very capable and quick in response, so if someone wants to get
an account for the purposes of checking this, it should not take more
than a day round-trip for the request to be processes). I am loathe to
email motzarella since it is most likely that I misunderstand
something about gnus than that there is some setting error on their
side which causes gnus grief.

Many thanks,
     Gernot Hassenpflug
     Tokyo, Japan
-- 
Grrr!!  ...Pick a reason...