[leafnode-list] Why am I getting these bursts of errors?

[Chris G]

OK, a bit of a vague question, I'll try and describe a little more.

I'm using leafnode in an Ubuntu 9.10 system to collect news from three
NNTP servers.  Most of the time it works well but every so often I get
lots of errors which continue over several connection attempts.  For
example for the last few hours I have been getting lots of:-

    error: NNTP server went away (server disconnect or timeout)
    error: news.eternal-september.org: received bogus greeting (498): (nil)
    error: NNTP server went away (server disconnect or timeout)
    error: news.annexcafe.com: received bogus greeting (498): (nil)
    news.annexcafe.com: address list exhausted without establishing connection.
    error: NNTP server went away (server disconnect or timeout)
    error: news.easysw.com: received bogus greeting (498): (nil)
    news.easysw.com: address list exhausted without establishing connection.
    WARNING: some servers have not been queried!

... and also an error about not being able to obtain a lock.

Now, as far as I can see, all of the above NNTP servers are accessible
from my machine and it seems a bit unlikely that all of them would go
down at the same time anyway.

So is there anything at my end that might cause this and take a while
to sort itself out?  E.g. any left over process or something like that?

-- 
Chris Green