There were a lot of problems with news propagation in
early-to-mid October due to a series of denial-of-service attacks
against news servers. Basically, someone discovered that one of
the popular news-server daemons, innd, could be killed off
[*snip*]. This meant that, for example, MIT's news service went
up and down for a few days until a patch was applied to fix the
innd problem on October 13. There are likely still many unpatched
news servers that are still affected by the problem. The patch
has, as far as I know, been very widely circulated, so I'd expect
that this problem will clear up soon if it hasn't already.
If your FAQ was posted and not archived during that period, you may
wish to repost it to ensure that it is properly stored at rtfm and its
various mirrors. If for some reason reposting isn't feasible, send
a complete copy of your FAQ to the moderation address with an
explanatory note and we'll archive it by hand. This latter method
won't be the speediest thing in the world, so please only use it if
your posting is normally both large and infrequent (less than every
two months).
Thanks,
- Pam Greene
moderation address <news-answers-request@mit.edu>