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Neil Bothwick

Neil Bothwick attempts to fix your Tux-based faults.

Q No news is not good news Following the demise of knode, I had to choose an alternative newsreader and found Pan. I am currently running it under Linux Mint 20 - or to be more accurate, I was until 21 July. Since then I can neither send or receive messages. The log reports:

“Unable to connect to “news.eternal-september.org:119":

483 encryption required

It is the same when I switched to news.aoie.org. I cannot find anything on the internet that might explain this. I can both receive and send using Thunderbird but I prefer a dedicated reader.

Alan Secker

The Pan newsreader can handle both plain and encrypted access to news servers, if it’s configured correctly.

A This is indeed odd; I have tried both Pan 0.145 and Pan 0.146 and cannot reproduce this problem. The message implies that an encrypted connection is required, but I was able to connect with and without using TLS. Check your settings carefully. If you have selected ‘Use Secure SSL Connections’ in the server configuration, make sure you also tick the box to trust the server’s certificate. When you switch to TLS, the port should change from the NNTP default of 119 to 563.

Try running Pan from a terminal in verbose mode:

$ pan --verbose

This will run the Pan GUI as normal, but spit out error and warning messages to the terminal. This should give you some clue as to what is going wrong, more so than the fairly simple event log available from the GUI. If you are running any sort of firewall, either on your computer or router, try turning it off briefly to see if that makes a difference, but don’t forget to turn it back on as soon as you can.