Is Leafnode still possible?

Last weekend I tried setting up a VM to provide cached Usenet articles using
Leafnode. I set it up to work with two servers: Eternal-September and the
paid service I use, Usenetnow. I have no problem logging into either
service on port 119 or 563 from my PC. I set up Leafnode to use the
standard unencrypted port 119 for compatibility reasons
in /etc/news/leafnode/config (using Debian 12). However, the result was
that Eternal-September refused to let me log in and Usenetnow worked, but
incredibly slowly; something like 1 article per second when trying to cache
news.groups.

Now, I have a fast internet connection and I don't technically *need*
Leafnode but I wanted to find a new way to store news articles for my
archives.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Jason