DNS Resolution Failure

Everything downstream of resolution is untested when this happens. No packet reached the provider, no port was tried, no certificate was seen, so nothing in the server settings beyond the hostname itself has been exercised. A reader troubleshooting from this error should resist changing ports, toggling SSL or re-entering credentials, because none of them are implicated and none of them can help.

Distinguishing it from a refused connection

These two are constantly confused. A refusal requires the hostname to have resolved successfully; a resolution failure means it never did. The log wording separates them: a message naming the hostname, or containing phrasing about a host not being found or a name not being resolved, is DNS, while a message naming an address and a port number is a connection failure. Timing is less reliable here, since a resolver can answer instantly from cache or hang for several seconds waiting on something unresponsive.

Whose resolver is at fault

Responsibility splits roughly three ways. A typo in the server name belongs to the reader and is worth ruling out first because it costs nothing. A resolver outage belongs to the access provider, not the news provider, and typically breaks every site on the connection at once, which makes it easy to confirm in a browser. Filtering is the third: some networks, routers with content controls, and some public resolvers block news-related hostnames outright, returning no answer or an address that leads nowhere. The news provider is at fault only in the uncommon case of a lapsed domain or a broken zone, which would affect every customer simultaneously.

Round-robin records and partial answers

Providers publish several addresses under one hostname and hand them out in rotation. A client can therefore receive the address of a machine that is out of service while another client resolving the same name receives a healthy one. The symptom is intermittent: connections succeed and fail alternately with no configuration change between attempts. Restarting the client, or waiting for the cached record to expire, usually lands on a working address. Hard-coding a single address to sidestep this trades the problem for a certificate hostname mismatch and the loss of automatic failover, so it is not a sound permanent arrangement.

Tests that isolate the layer

1. Resolve the hostname from a command line. An answer means DNS is working and the fault is elsewhere; no answer confirms the diagnosis.
2. Repeat the lookup against a different public resolver. Success there with failure against the default identifies the access provider's resolver or local filtering.
3. Check whether other sites resolve. A general outage is the ISP's and needs no action beyond waiting.
4. Note that a browser configured for encrypted DNS may resolve names the newsreader cannot, because the newsreader uses the system resolver. A hostname that loads in a browser is not proof that the system resolver can find it.