Back from Tassie now and the wonderful Cygnet Folk Festival. For Sandra-in-Sydney's sake, all you Mac users are probably immune from the spyware that Max is blocking. The other problems with access are harder to diagnose from what people have described as symptoms. Perhaps it's just the regular server being too busy to respond, while the buddy one is less of a target...

If those sypware tools cause extra traffic, plus the number of new search engines which seem to ignore the usual advice about which links to follow it's no wonder that there is an overloading problem. A search robot will fetch pages as fast as it can get them, so it doesn't take a lot of that to soak up a server. Full marks to Max for sorting that out as well as putting the block on dopes who install spyware...

Anyway, it's working fine for me (Mozilla on Linux).

Chris