Lots of fun and games with networking. About the first of Feb my email and newsgroups flaked out. This has happened with mail a few times in the past and generally it was something squirrelly in the infrastructure at Comcast, ne ATTBI, ne @Home. Well it never came back so I started fiddling with software. I had updated my Mozilla to 1.6 around that time so that's where the fiddling began. I uninstalled 1.6, reinstalled 1.5, uninstalled 1.5, reinstalled 1.6, installed Thunderbird, got some email functionality back, migrated as much as possible to Thunderbird, still no news, installed Xnews, same symptom with it. The symptom was the news readers could connect to the servers with no errors but no news protocol seemed to ever take place.
After determining Comcast wasn't conciously interfering with news in a dastardly plot to force everyone to Giganews, I tried Mozilla 1.4 on another PC and it didn't work any better. This meant basically a range of software on more than one machine was experiencing the same problem. The only program I could talk to the news servers with was telnet and that's not a very satisfying news reading experience.
Finally I decided the one black box I hadn't shook up was my Linksys router that was running the latest version of its software. So, out of desparation, I reloaded its software with the previous version and everything came back to life. I've reported the whole mess to Cisco/Linksys and I'll post the result here when they respond. So if you're running a Linksys BEFSR41, stick with version 1.44.2 of the firmware and be very leery of installing 1.45.7.
