Newsgroups for idiots
July 14, 2008I know there a lot of people who don’t know about newsgroups or have become completely frustrated in using them. The thing is… they’re great and probably provided by your ISP for free. Finally something that uses all the potential of ADSL2+.
If you are still confused with what im talking about, its like torrents but faster and better.
What’s so great about newsgroups?
- You download from a server so it is super fast- essentially maxes out your connection. I get 1.5MB/s at home easily.
- There are no ratios to worry about
- You download over SSL so people can’t tell what you’re downloading
- You done have to seed to other people
- You are not slowed down by the number of other people downloading
What can I get from newsgroups?
- everything!
- Bluray movies
- Xbox games
- other large isos
- tv shows
- music
- when someone posts something to any group it will appear on all servers and stay there for however long the retention of your server is (100 days or so for astranews).
What is needed?
- Access to a newsgroup server – Try news.astranews.com. ISPs often provide a newsgroup service but often the retention is very poor. Astranews is an example of a premium newsgroup service. Internode provides astranews and giganews for free to customers.
- A newsgroup reader/binary downloader (the equivalent of utorrent for torrents) – I use grabit but it wont work behind a proxy so you might need to try “agent” or have a search, you need one that supports nzb downloading
How does it work?
- Set up your newsgroup reader (setting up the reader/downloader is pretty straight forward, you don’t need to worry about subscribing to any groups)
- Go to somewhere like nzbmatrix.com or nzbsource.com or binsearch.info (these are like mininova or isohunt) and get an NZB file. The nzb file contains a list of articles that contain your files that will need to be downloaded. You really don’t have to worry about it, if your getting it from binsearch, make sure its complete. You also want to make sure that the files you get are not older than the retention of your server (no older than ~100 days for astranews).
- Use your binary downloader to open the nzb file and it should start downloading a list of files or articles and making them into files.
- unrar your files and enjoy
How does it really work?
- Newsgroups were traditionally used to post written articles to servers but people worked out how to serialise any data and put it on there (using yenc). Even partitioned rar files are broken up many many times so that they fit to individual articles.
- There are global groups such as “alt.binaries.games.xbox” that are synchronised between all of the servers so that no matter what server you are using you can access the same content. There are server specific groups but we won’t worry about them.
- “binaries” in the group name indicates that it is really only files that are contained in the group. There are ones that don’t have any binaries and are used just for discussion.
What are these par files?
- The par files are used for checking the data.
- Since the data is split up and then put back together, it often contains errors, especially if you use a dodgy server or the posts have been on the server for ages. PAR files essentially check the parity (der so obvious) and can repair the files and even fill in missing files. It’s a good idea to get them; normally it’s an extra 10% of the download size.
- There are a number of par file checkers around. It’s good to get one with a windows shell. Quickpar is acceptable for windows.
- It can take a while to check all of the files