NewsLeecher – Adding servers and Usenet newsgroups
Binaries4all QuickJumpIn this chapter we are going to add some servers and Usenet newsgroups to NewsLeecher. Let’s start by adding our news server.
Select the Manager tab and click on Add to add a new server.
The Server Setup screen appears, and we have to enter the details about the server. Let’s start with Server Details.
| Server address: | The address (hostname) of your server. |
| Port: | Almost always 119. |
| Server nickname: | Just a name for your server to be recognized in NewsLeecher. |
| Connections: | Maximum number of connections allowed to your server. If you enter too many connections, you will get errors while downloading. |
| Priority: | Priority of your server. NewsLeecher will try to download from servers with priority 1 first. If for any reason NewsLeecher cannot, it will try servers with a lower priority. It is wise to give your normal server (provider) a high priority, and other servers (such as payservers) lower priorities, to prevent unnecessary downloads from those servers. |
| Server Requires Login: | If your server requires authentication, you will have to enter your username and password here. |
And the second tab:
| Use for Group Updates: | Check if you want to use your server for group updates. |
| Use for Article Downloads: | Check if you want to use your server for article downloads. |
| Use for Server Searches: | Check if you want to use your server for XPAT searches. |
Normally you probably want to activate all options, but if you’re using multiple servers, some interesting combinations are possible:
Some background information before I explain these three options: Files posted in Usenet newsgroups are divided into pieces called segments, parts or articles. Each article has a unique ID, called the ‘message ID’. This message ID is the same on every server.
If you want to use multiple servers for downloading, you can choose to collect headers only from the server where most files are complete. Downloading can be carried out by all servers, however . We can create this situation by checking Use for group updates on the server we want to use for updating the headers, and un-checking it on other servers.
Another situation is to have an XPAT search carried out at only one server but to download from all servers again. (XPAT is outdated, so we will not discuss it in this tutorial. Modern alternatives are NZB files and search engines like SuperSearch). We therefore have to check Use for server searches on the server we want to use for the search and uncheck it on the other servers.
If you don’t want to actually download files from a server but you do want to use it for header updates and server searches, just uncheck Use for article downloads. As you can see, many combinations are possible. Please feel free to try out some of your own.
All right, let’s move on. The screenshot below shows us the results of our previous actions. I added two servers, my ISP’s server and a payserver. If you have access to more servers you can add them in the same way as we did before.
It is also possible to disable a server completely. Just uncheck the server in your server list.
Downloading group list
We’re still on the Manager tab. On the right you see two small tabs. Let’s click on Subscribe to Groups and then click on Fetch Entire Group List to download a list of all the groups available on our servers.
Just click on Yes to begin receiving the group list:
At the bottom of the main screen you can see NewsLeecher downloading the group list from both our servers.
A notification appears when the group list has been received. Just click on OK.
Subscribing to Usenet newsgroups
Before you can download from Usenet newsgroups with NewsLeecher, you have to subscribe to these Usenet newsgroups. Subscribing is nothing more than adding the group to NewsLeecher.
A list of all available the groups was shown in the main screen . Later on in this tutorial we’re going to download a post from alt.binaries.x, so let’s subscribe to this group. Just enter alt.binaries.x into the Group Name Search, select the group and click on Subscribe.
Now if you click on Back, you can see that alt.binaries.x has been added to the list:
Now we have set up our servers, downloaded the group list and actually subscribed to a Usenet newsgroup, it’s time to collect the headers from that group. You can also combine multiple groups into a virtual group, but that is beyond the scope of this tutorial.
To the next chapter: Downloading headers
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