Little confused by usenet servers

S

shugasheila

New member
Been playing around with newsgroups for a few days and I think I pretty well got the jist of it but I don't understand how multiple providers offer the same newsgroups with the same articles. Also when someone posts to one does it become available to the other newsgroup providers?
 
mydarkpassenge said:
Also when someone posts to one does it become available to the other newsgroup providers?
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Short answer is, usenet is an 'electronic bucket brigade'. A message posted (in a particular news-group, of course) is 'echoed' to all the other servers, so eventually all servers have it. IF the others handle that particular group, of course.

Each message has a unique ID (how the system keeps track of them), although with the amount of traffic these days, the move is on (kinda like IPv4 v. IPv6 addresses) to move to the next step up; ID's are currently a 28-digit alpha-numeric number (you can 'read' it at the top of the message header), but the move is on to expand it to either 56 or 64 or something like that.

Most every provider carries all the groups, any more. The real 'cheapies' (like some of the ISP news-server operations, of which their are disappearingly few these days), may not carry some (or all) of the binary groups, because of the traffic load (several terabytes per day).

You can slog through the technical crud on the usenet protocol (how these providers 'talk' to each other), but that's the basic gist.
 
Thanks for the replies. So I assume certain newsgroups aren't available through all servers. For example, I tried giganews for the trial and decided to switch to astraweb for the $11 a month for life deal. I noticed that a.b.boneless isn't available on astraweb even though it's the most popular newsgroup on giganews. It seems to be the only one listed on search engines that I don't see.

Also I see a lot of talk of retention. Some people complain though because files are supposed to be hosted x number of days and then there's missing parts to a file or it's not hosted as long as it should be. I've also heard of files being hosted with broken parts. What I'm wondering is why are there missing parts in these files and why aren't files hosted as long as they should be?

I'm checking out the howstuffworks article now!
 
Uhhh, you need to check your eyesight. a.b.boneless is indeed on Astraweb, as THE primary source for euro-porn, it'd

be really a major deal if it wasn't :lol:

mydarkpassenge said:
Also I see a lot of talk of retention. Some people complain though because files are supposed to be hosted x number of days and then there's missing parts to a file or it's not hosted as long as it should be. I've also heard of files being hosted with broken parts. What I'm wondering is why are there missing parts in these files and why aren't files hosted as long as they should be?
Click to expand...

Nothing is 100% perfect. The 'bucket brigade' leaks. First, you have the connection between the OP (original poster) to a news-server, then the interconnections between the news-servers themselves. Despite the fact we all call this 'digital', in point of fact (as a telecommunications engineer) is that it's all really quasi-analog (sep. the link from the OP to the initial news-server, whether talking DSL or cablemodem).

Most news-servers now are running a 'repair' system that, if the OP uploads a goodly amount of pars (repair files), the server will attempt to repair the upload. But it does (obviously) take time, which is why you shouldn't 'jump' right on the upload (indeed, it may not be totally finished yet, unless the OP has a huge amount of bandwidth), but wait for a few days before jumping on it.

As far as 'retention', that's been the bane of usenet since about day one. When I first started using Usenet (mid-80's), when the preponderance of groups/traffic were text, having a couple of weeks was considered way more than enough. Now, most text groups are considered to NEVER 'roll off' the storage, and binary groups (music/video) is about to exceed 1 year.

There are several sites out there that 'track' usenet traffic loads, and like I said in my original reply, the amount of traffic today, for the major binary groups like your example a.b.boneless, well into 20Terrabytes per DAY. That's just ONE GROUP. It's jaw-dropping. Most server plant's have multiple OC192/STM64 interlinks (look those up on wikipedia). From someone who ran a nice little usenet server back in the mid-90's on a couple of ISDN (128Kb/s) lines, it's OUT OF CONTROL!!
 
Just refreshed my grouplist. I have a.b.boneless.nl and a.b.bonless only. Neither even have a million articles. Another question I have (if you don't mind) is what's the best binary newsreaders, free and commercial? I've tried a few including newsbin and newsleecher as well as grabit and alt.binz but none seem great. They also don't prompt you where to install something they just download to the default location. Also what's the best search methods for finding articles? I've tried a few engines including binsearch, binabled, newzleech, etc. and they are ok but there's a ton of broken files on these, and they aren't the greatest to read through, especially since they tend to lack any description, etc. One thing I liked with torrent sites was the detail you could get off of them. Rapidshare seems to have things like this but I don't know if there are any newsgroup sites like this. Any help?
 
You still probably aren't doing thing quite right (or looking at the right spot in the program); Giganews is telling me that a.b.boneless is over 45 MILLION articles, while Astra is saying.. the same!

'Free' servers are worth exactly what you pay for them... which is to say, NOTHING. I doubt you'd find hardly any even trying to do the binary groups, and retention... what's that??? Maybe a couple of days.

Astraweb is making the most waves right now with it's $11/month deal, SSL included at no additional cost. 1/3rd the cost of Giganews.

If the OP (original poster) failed to supply an NFO, then you're a bit out of luck; but a lot of the time the info in the header line is enough (tv type, size, etc), but I'd say better than 75% in the 'good' groups have NFO's.

Lots of the sites like this one, Newzbin, NZBMatrix, have some dedicated users/posters who do a good job of vacuuming up the goodies. That doesn't mean, though, that it TOTALLY relieves folks of doing some header downloading, just to keep a feel of the pulse of the groups. I do headers on about a good dozen groups that have (over the years) tended to have what I'm looking for.

It's kinda like flying on autopilot (the sites) rather than taking controls and geting feel of the ride. I've gotten quite a bit of goodies that NEVER showed up on the indexing sites. Quite frankly, I probably should be putting more up on this site, for what I find, but I have to kinda shut down my typical 'operation' to upload the nzb and additional info to here. If ir's REALLY REALLY good, I will.

The reason I quit Torrents is the general lack of real (technical) information. That and the general lack of any real structure.. but I guess that might be my opinion.

As I've said before (to much howling and such), Torrents are for kiddies. Usenet is for folks who need to get things done. That's why you'll see very little video other than DVD (Divx/Xvid is kind of a waste of time/effort), even MP3's have almost gone the way of the dodo (lossless is king). Why? Because the bandwidth out of these commercial servers is.... H U G E, I've seem folks across town from me on FIOS/50Mb/s feeds get completely swamped/filled. If you want to play around with compressed formats, get the s/w to do what you want. The pure feed is on usenet.
 
Wasn't talking about free servers just free clients. As I mentioned I tried two different popular commercial clients newsleecher and newsbin and neither I truly liked. I actually played with alt.binz and I generally think it's pretty nice, although still pretty buggy. I think it will be great when it's working well later though. It did show alt.binaries.boneless but it didn't list an article count for it for some reason. Please forgive my ignorance, I'm still relatively new to newsgroups, but my issue with looking through the headers is trying to grab all the pieces for a particular download. As far as downloads go my old ISP used to cap me at 40GB a month so a choice between a 4.5 GB download and a 1GB download does matter to some. This isn't uncommon in the USA. Also I have a media center and I keep files in avi format on it. I don't even deal with DVDs anymore except to burn a movie for someone else. If I download a DVD I have to then convert it to an avi so I can store it on my media center.
 
As far as clients, it comes down to what works, and what you're comfortable with. I have used a commercial program 'NewsRover' for at least 8+ years, mostly because it's very programmable and I got over the 'tweaking' hump long ago, that if another client came along with good features, it'd probably not be worth the time and effort to re-learn something new (and besides, my poor brain can only take so much!).

Bandwidth 'caps' aren't uncommon, it's just that anyone who really wants to 'put the hammer down' simply won't deal with it. In my case, other than selling my home and moving across town to FIOS-land (not gonna happen in THIS economy!), I could get much faster connex with cable, but won't put up with their stupid nonsense, which includes transfer and speed caps (not to mention delays and 'network management' that clogs up certain protocols), plus high prices, that pretty much renders the speed increase moot. So, I have (by comparison) semi-low-speed DSL, BUT (ah.. always the BUT!), I run my connex 24x7x52 at around 90+% throughput.

That yields around 1.5 DVD9's a day. 10+/week, or 40+/month; been going like that for about... 6+ years now. You say you have everything on a media server, but I have just about (rule of thumb here) around 150TB of movies on DVD. At current HD prices, that would work out to around $15K just in base cost, plus of course the chassis and ancillary stuff to support it all.

Sure, you could downrez everything to Divx/Xvid or AVI, but I'm holding off going Blu-Ray as it is, standard DVD's on my HDTV's is just about the minimum quality, and a lot of what comes out of the mastering plants even these days is sometimes pretty bad quality wise. I guess that it's what you can tolerate, but just about 10 years ago (before digital tv's and such) I was probably of the same mind.

So I had to go back and redo a lot of stuff I did for the first 4-5 years or so. Now I know that there will be lots of duplication of effort with HD/Blu-Ray, but I think it will be spread out over a much longer period of time because it's going to take that for the studio's to crank up the effort to re-master things for HD. And a lot of the early tv stuff (4x3 particularly) won't probably be in HD for a very long time. Heck, they just stared doing a fair amount of network series in widescreen and surround sound about 10 years ago.

Hell, they can't even get that right all the time, right now. Several Blu-Ray titles have been recalled due to poor mastering and errors, so... going to be a while yet. Meanwhile, 2001 technology (about when standard-def DVD's started getting good with Anamorphic Widescreen and DTS audio), is doing fine for now.

So as everything sits, right now, works for me. Do I want faster internet? Sure! Do I want 60" HD sets
 
I rarely look at headers, I look at size, if the size matches the installer size from the homepage (of the program) and an extra 30-60 mb for PAR's, then generally it's legit. You get more fakes from software than anything else....movies are the easiest to decide if there fake or real...

I personally use Newsleecher, it's in the NZB software section and it's fully working with super search, but it's to each his own.

Well here's everything about Usenet in guide form, go ahead and take a look around, it will answer alot of your questions.

http://www.binaries4all.com/
 
mydarkpassenge said:
Wasn't talking about free servers just free clients. As I mentioned I tried two different popular commercial clients newsleecher and newsbin and neither I truly liked. I actually played with alt.binz and I generally think it's pretty nice, although still pretty buggy. I think it will be great when it's working well later though. It did show alt.binaries.boneless but it didn't list an article count for it for some reason.
Click to expand...
What exactly did you not like about Newsleecher and Newsbin? Too complicated? Too simple?

Did you use the free or "pay" version of alt.binz? Keep in mind that Alt.Binz does not do actual headers - it acts as a GUI for several binary search sites like Binsearch.info where you can browse posts made to a group (which is somewhat similar in concept to viewing headers) but remember that these "headers" you see are not coming from your actual NNTP server, but from the site's own usenet server (Binsearch.info uses Giganews, for example, which uses a different grouplist from Astraweb)

As far as newsreaders/binary-grabbers/NZB-downloaders go, what is "best" all depends on what is important to you - since each person has his own particular and unique needs.

For instance, I've found that, overall, Usenet Explorer has far more features and functions (for both text reading and binary posts) than anything else I've ever tried. However, it is also the hardest to learn, and in my opinion best suited for the true "power user".

If you fetch headers, for instance, Usenet Explorer fully supports Astraweb's XZVER/XZHDR header compression (as well as Highwinds own implementation) in addition to Stunnel's standard zlib SSL wrapper. So you can download headers in a fraction of the time as uncompressed streams will take. Newsbin Pro currently ranks second to Usenet Explorer in compressed header support. (No other client currently offers this feature, but Newsleecher promises to offer it in their next major release.)

Conversely, if you are looking for something very easy to learn, and you mainly just download popular movies from NZB sites (especially if you want to watch or preview them as well as download) then a simple NZB downloader like NZB Player might be the ideal solution.

So I would suggest trying out several "newsreaders" to see what suits your needs best (and how much time you want to spend learning the software).

The free version of alt.binz (o.25) is rather outdated, and many of its search engines no longer work. Grabit is free and easy to learn, but not up to current standards (and easily crashes downloading big header groups) Some "pay" clients can of course be used for free almost indefinitely (I've been doing this with Usenet Explorer recently - which I use mainly for the compressed headers)

Slyck has a long list of news clients here: http://www.slyck.com/programs.php?cat_id=1
 
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