Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 8185 Location: Fingerlakes - NY usa
NNTP, NZB, Usenet, Newsgroups etc.
Why Usenet for downloading? -Often provides the fastest speed your ISP allows, no upload ratios (safe from RIAA/MPAA), convenient, sometimes anonymous (depends on server).
Why Usenet for uploading? -Fastest way to distribute a file to random people (upload once, and thousands can download). Some servers provide anonymity.
*Note: The first two posts are a concise and updated version of the big fat guide at http://www.slyck.com/ng.php modified for this site. Most of the text for this was copied from there.
Honestly: A guide isn't necessary for everyone. I learned to use newsgroups without one simply by downloading a newsreader and subscribing to a server after searching for the best ones. (Don't be intimidated by the size of this)
1. Intro
Unless you are familiar with them, navigating and downloading files from the newsgroups takes a good deal more effort than connecting to KaZaA, searching for something, and clicking on the result. A typical download from the newsgroups will require more steps than other methods because a large file is usually split into many pieces in the following way:
The reason this is all necessary is that many news servers will not accept messages that are longer than 10,000 lines, many even less than that. A 700 MB movie would take around 15 Million lines if it were encoded into one message -- way too much for any news server to accept. The reason for the first split into rar files is a matter of the nature of the newsgroups : some messages don't make it. For one reason or another messages don't always get to every server. A large file is split up to minimize the time/bandwidth needed to recover from a missing/bad message. So in our example above, if a message doesn't make it for part movie.r08 it would only be necessary to find and download that piece rather than the whole thing if it were all one file. PAR files have emerged making the argument for splitting into rar files even stronger. Luckily for music fans, most mp3's are not split the first time, so downloading them is easy as pie!
Additional newsgroup confusion arises from the listing of groups that can be hard to distinguish which messages are the files you need amongst all the other messages that are not files but actual text messages.
So is it worth it? You better believe it! The newsgroups are an awesome resource. If you're not using them and are ready to kick it up a level check them out. You won't believe your eyes!
2. News Servers
A news server is a machine that stores all of the messages for the newsgroups that it carries and communicates with other news servers to send and receive new messages. Each news server is at least one computer that has enormous storage capacity - keeping all of the messages around that contain files (encoded into thousands of lines of text each) takes up a tremendous amount of space. This leads us to a term you should get to understand : Retention
This explains how retention times get set for different newsgroups. On each news server the administrator will determine the retention for each newsgroup usually by allotting it a certain amount of hard drive space. So alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.classical (a relatively busy newsgroup receiving 100's of songs a day) will have a longer retention than alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.complete_cd (an extremely busy newsgroup receiving 1000's of songs a day). An easy way to tell what the retention is for a newsgroup is to look through the list and see when the oldest messages are from. If all the messages are from the last three days, then the retention is about 3 days!
Completion
This is another term that you should get to know, when it comes to news servers you want to know it's speed, retention, and completion rate. The completion rate is a percentage based on how many messages there are for a file and how many the server actually received. In plain english, it is the percentage of how many files actually are complete and available for download. A file may have 100 or more text messages that make all the data for the file, if any of these messages are missing then the file must wait to either get the missing data from a repost or through the use of PAR/PAR2 files. The higher the completion rate (eg. 95%) the more messages are getting through and the fewer files are not available due to missing parts. This is crucial, any seasoned newsgroup user knows the enormous difference between a listing that is destroyed by missing parts and a wonderful server that has almost perfect completion and the experience is sooo much better.
Choosing a News Server
There are two ways commonly used to gain access to a news server:
1. Use the news server maintained by your Internet Service Provider (ISP).
2. Pay for news server access.
1. Use the news server maintained by your ISP.
Most ISP's maintain a news server that they allow their subscribers to access. Some are very good servers carrying most newsgroups and have high completion rates. Completion is simply the percentage of messages that make it to the server (low completion means a server is missing a lot of messages making downloading very difficult). The problem is that many ISP's neglect their news server and therefore have low completion rates. There are, however, many ISP's that have wonderful servers running - fast and high completion rates. The only way to know is to find out what the address of your ISP's news server is and try it out!
A news server may require you to log into it using a user name and password. Usually the news servers run by ISP's do not require you to log on using a user name and password because they assign you your IP address (your unique internet location address) and the server automatically accepts only those IPs it recognizes.
To find out if your ISP has a news server and to find the IP address go to the customer support section of their website and search for "news server" or "nntp". If their website doesn't help, give them a call and ask whether they have a news server and what the address is. Bargain ISP's (such as Netzero and Juno) generally do not maintain news servers.
2. Using a subscription news server.
There are many reasons for deciding to use a news server that you have to pay to access. You may have an ISP that doesn't have a news server. Your ISP may have a news server, but it isn't worth much because it's slow, or has a low completion rate, or doesn't carry the binary newsgroups. You may have a relatively decent news server and want a cheap news server that you can access that can fill in the missing files from your normal news server. Whatever your reason, these servers can be GREAT to awful. Usually in this market, as most, you get what you pay for. And most times you can get what you need at a reasonable price. When you sign up for one of these services they will tell you what the name of the server(s) is and issue you a user name and password that you must enter into the news reader.
This site is an affiliate of Newshosting. You can support this site by signing up with one of the best usenet servers there are. It does not have the fastest speed, but it maxes out most people's connection speed anyway. It doesn't largest retention either, but then large retention can cause problems with downloading headers. Popular articles are often reposted to usenet, and the media you'll likely want and get you probably won't be able to keep up with. The only servers I know that are faster and or have larger retention are also more expensive. I highly recommend Newshosting not only because we're an affiliate, but I believe they are the right choice for most people! Use this link to support this site: Newshosting -Thank You!
3. Newsreaders
A news reader is a program that you install on your computer to connect to a news server where all the messages are stored. Upon first running, the news reader will connect to the news server and retrieve a list of all the newsgroups that are carried by that news server. When you want to see a list of the messages in a newsgroup, the news reader will connect to the news server and retrieve the list of messages (the headers of the messages) in that group without actually downloading the messages themselves (the body of the messages). Now you can browse through the list of messages to see what is available in that group at the time. If you decide to download something that you see listed, simply highlight it (if it has more than 1 file, highlight all parts) and the news reader will download the messages and decode them into binary files.
This site recommends:
Windows:
Alt.binz free
Newsleecher: $34.95 (read the details and make sure of what you're getting) or
Newsbin Pro: $35 (one time)
Grabit: free *might be buggy for some versions
XNews: Free
Newsgroups are organized in a hierarchical structure where there are general categories containing sub-categories containing sub-categories etc. The majority of newsgroups that contain binary-encoded messages begin with alt.binaries. From there you have an enormous selection of newsgroups packed with some very interesting things. Remember, your news server may not carry all of the newsgroups on our lists. Whether it is movies, music, programs or images you are after, check below to see our favorite newsgroups for the different types of downloads.
Last edited by madthumbs on Sun Jan 06, 2008 6:36 pm; edited 31 times in total
Sun Mar 19, 2006 1:50 pm
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madthumbs
Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 8185 Location: Fingerlakes - NY usa
5. RAR Files
RAR is a compression application like Winzip and is the standard on the binary newsgroups largely because it can split large files into parts that can be re-assembled.
From WinRAR 3.0 on, the first file of an archive will have an extension of ".part1.rar", before that it would be ".rar". This first file can be opened with WinRar, or for Mac users there's UnRarX, and Unrar for Linux / Unix.
[PAR]ity files are used to reconstruct files that are missing from an archive. If you're missing one of the rar or archive files, you can use QuickPAR, Gpar (gnome), Kpar (KDE), Par2 or PyPar (linux general), or MacPar Deluxe (Mac) to reconstruct the missing or corrupted file. The greater the par/ par2 files, the more loss you can recover from. An alternative to par2, that may take root: ICE ECC,
Once you have your nzb handling newsreader configured with it's server information (easy) you can open nzb's with the reader and have it automatically download files for you!
Last edited by madthumbs on Mon Dec 17, 2007 9:44 am; edited 6 times in total
Sun Mar 19, 2006 1:59 pm
madthumbs
Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 8185 Location: Fingerlakes - NY usa
Usenet made Simple!
*These programs automate the process of parity checking (par), and unraring (rar). They can make it as simple to download from usenet as any other website download by post processing the archives, and ECC in the background:
hellanzb is a Python application designed for *nix environments that retrieves nzb files and fully processes them. The goal being to make getting files from Usenet (e.g.: Giganews Newsgroups) as hands-free as possible. Once fully installed, all thats required is moving an nzb file to the queue directory. The rest; fetching, par-checking, un-raring, etc. is taken care of by hellanzb.
Look for defineServer and change the account settings to your usenet account settings.Change the PREFIX dir to:
/home/your-user-name/
You can change the other directories to your preference but it is not needed. There are also a lot of other options in the config file, change if needed.
If you want to Run the program use the following command
hellanzb.py
Download a NZB file and place it in
/home/your-user-dir/nzb/daemon.queue/
or whatever directory you choose in the config file.
Finished files will be in
/home/your-user-dir/usenet/
Last edited by madthumbs on Wed Mar 12, 2008 10:48 am; edited 1 time in total
Sat Apr 21, 2007 9:27 am
madthumbs
Joined: 22 Feb 2006 Posts: 8185 Location: Fingerlakes - NY usa
How to Find NZB's
NZB's are small xtml files (text) that are used by NZB capable programs to automatically download a specified collection of files from usenet. They work similar to an ed2k hash. NZB's eliminate the need for searching through headers or groups.
You can use a normal search to find NZB Indexing sites
