Walt-O-Matic

Just spent a few minutes circling trying to get Verizon news groups working. Here’s how I did it, you’ll need a news reader - OS X users, go try Unison.

First, I went to Verizon’s start page, http://start.verizon.net/, and discovered I could not login. Since I don’t use Verizon’s email or web services, I had no clue what my username and password was.

Calling 888-553-1555 and asking for Verizon FiOS Internet Technical Support (a 24/7 service) got me through to someone who was easily able to tell me my username and reset my password to an obscure string of characters. He then helped me log on to the web page and change my password, to which I did.

At that point, I made the mistake of hanging up and attempting to connect to the Usenet on my own. It didn’t work.

I called back, and again got someone who was quite helpful, and through some minor experimentation figured out what was going on.

• Some Verizon literature states the server is newsgroups.verizon.net, it is not. The correct news server is news.verizon.net, and you can ping it. The IP address I got was 199.45.49.11.
• Be sure that you don’t enter verizon.com - that will not work. You want dot net.
• Even though I had changed my password, it had not propagated - to access the Usenet, I needed my old password, the one the tech person read over the phone.
• Your username does not include @verison.net at the end of it, don’t type that. It was a bad habit my previous ISP started.
• The news server does not support SSL, stay with port 119.

The tech support person also mentioned there was a page for setting up newsgroups with Verizon FiOS online.

From what I can tell, Verizon has very good news group article retention.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 5:55 pm and is filed under How To, Web Places. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.