leafnode problem

[Alisdair McDiarmid <alisdair@jml.net>]

I'm trying to use leafnode to access my university's nntphost, which
requires authentication. It appears to connect okay, but it doesn't
ever fetch any articles:

[root@skinny /var/spool/news/interesting.groups] # fetchnews -vvv
1.9.9: verbosity level is 3
   [snip irrelevancy]
Trying to connect to news.pair.com ... connected.
Getting new newsgroups from news.pair.com
   [snip irrelevancy]
Disconnected from news.pair.com.
Trying to connect to nntphost.cs.strath.ac.uk ... connected.
Getting new newsgroups from nntphost.cs.strath.ac.uk
Read server info from
/var/spool/news/leaf.node/nntphost.cs.strath.ac.uk
comp.unix.shell: considering articles 80403-81561
uk.forsale: considering articles 30251-60240
strath.cs.forsale: considering articles 4-12
pair.future: considering articles 3-221

Bizarrely, nntphost.cs.strath.ac.uk only carries strath.*, not
comp.unix.shell, uk.forsale or pair.future (the latter being a
pair.com-only newsgroup!) and I've got interesting.newsgroups/ files
for many more strath.* newsgroups than strath.cs.forsale, but they're
never mentioned by fetchnews.

The other two news servers I'm using work perfectly well (the pair.com
one requires authentication too), and I can use slrn to directly
access the nntphost.cs.strath.ac.uk one (so my password isn't
incorrect). But I still can't get fetchnews to download articles from
the university server.

Can anyone help me find what I'm doing wrong? What sort of thing
should I be looking for?
-- 
alisdair mcdiarmid                                    alisdair@jml.net
[the day is done but i'm having fun i think i'm dumb maybe just happy]