trouble setting up gnus

[Brendan Miller]

I'm setting up gnus to connect like this:

(setq user-mail-address "my-email")
(setq user-full-name "my name")
(setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "news.eternal-september.org"))

in ~/.gnus.el

This gnus-select-method doesn't seem to pull down any newsgroups in my
groups buffer. A k and A z don't indicate any groups are killed or
zombied either.

However, if I hit B and manually enter news.eternal-september.org, I
can select newsgroups.

Why would I be able to manually enter newsgroups via B, but not get
newsgroups from setting gnus-select-method? Any hints?