You neglected to mention as to whether you saw this behavior in 2.3.3 :) > It's quite strange: 503 failing server rebuild in progress (2317 > groups complete, at least 683 groups to go. Please try again later. > Connection closed by foreign host. This means that you are only seeing 2317 groups from all servers combined, but require at least 3000 to consider your nnptcache "operational". The key configuration variable here is `minActive'. If the news-server you are feeding off actually have more than this number of groups, then it looks like one of them is falling over. Cheers, Julian. -- Stefan Kahrs in [Kah96] discusses the notion of completeness--programs which never go wrong can be type-checked--which complements Milner's notion of soundness--type-checked programs never go wrong [Mil78].