Hi,

My ISP has recently been taken over and everything is
"new and improved". I'm currently using Motzarella
as a news server, and it is working quite well.

My new ISP apparently supports NZB. I haven't
quite worked out what that is yet. According to
www.altbinz.net.wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions,
"An NZB is an XML-based file for retrieving posts
from NNTP (Usenet) servers."

Is there anything in Mandriva that can make
sense of it? Is it worth trying to make
sense of it?

TIA


--
sig goes here...
Peter D.

Peter D. wrote:

> Hi,
>
> My ISP has recently been taken over and everything is
> "new and improved". I'm currently using Motzarella
> as a news server, and it is working quite well.
>
> My new ISP apparently supports NZB. I haven't
> quite worked out what that is yet. According to
> www.altbinz.net.wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions,
> "An NZB is an XML-based file for retrieving posts
> from NNTP (Usenet) servers."
>
> Is there anything in Mandriva that can make
> sense of it? Is it worth trying to make
> sense of it?
>
> TIA
>
>
Any newsreader can read Usenet posts. A list of NZBs
(http://nzbsite.com/view-all-nzbs.php) lists DVDs, BIG stuff. Don't touch
them unless you have plenty of bandwidth. Searching the Mandriva packages
by description produced no match. I have no personal experience of NZBs,
but I have noticed that some newsreaders for binaries (e.g. altbinz, which
installed easily) will handle them.

That site also has a link to alt.binaries. I played around with downloading
binaries. With my download rate, things disappeared before I had completed
the download. The site claims that they keep the files up a bit longer
(over 110 days.) They were sent in sections, and you needed a program to
stitch them together.

Doug.

Peter D. schreef:
> Hi,
>
>
> Is there anything in Mandriva that can make
> sense of it? Is it worth trying to make
> sense of it?

When you want to download binaries (movies, cd's, linux-distro's).
I do not have a lot of experience, but klibido does a nice job. Pan is
more alround but i never got the hang of it.

nzb's can be found on places like these: http://www.binsearch.info/

Peter

on Thursday 06 March 2008 23:41
in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva
Doug Laidlaw wrote:

> Peter D. wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> My ISP has recently been taken over and everything is
>> "new and improved". I'm currently using Motzarella
>> as a news server, and it is working quite well.
>>
>> My new ISP apparently supports NZB. I haven't
>> quite worked out what that is yet. According to
>> www.altbinz.net.wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions,
>> "An NZB is an XML-based file for retrieving posts
>> from NNTP (Usenet) servers."
>>
>> Is there anything in Mandriva that can make
>> sense of it? Is it worth trying to make
>> sense of it?
>>
>> TIA
>>
>>
> Any newsreader can read Usenet posts. A list of NZBs
> (http://nzbsite.com/view-all-nzbs.php) lists DVDs, BIG stuff. Don't touch
> them unless you have plenty of bandwidth. Searching the Mandriva packages
> by description produced no match. I have no personal experience of NZBs,
> but I have noticed that some newsreaders for binaries (e.g. altbinz, which
> installed easily) will handle them.
[snip]

Mandriva 2008.0 has klibido and nget available, which apparently
support nzb.

The problem is trying to get any news articles from my ISP's
news server with any news reader (or Leafnode). They list a
few news readers / grabbers that they say work, but of course,
they are Windows programs. Strangely they do not seem to
support Microsoft's news reader or Mozilla's.

I am unsure whether it is a failed migration of the old ISP's
customers or failed nntp administration (or both).


--
sig goes here...
Peter D.

On 2008-03-07, Peter D. <psd@live.home.invalid> wrote:
> on Thursday 06 March 2008 23:41
> in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva
> Doug Laidlaw wrote:
>
>> Peter D. wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> My ISP has recently been taken over and everything is
>>> "new and improved". I'm currently using Motzarella
>>> as a news server, and it is working quite well.
>>>
>>> My new ISP apparently supports NZB. I haven't
>>> quite worked out what that is yet. According to
>>> www.altbinz.net.wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions,
>>> "An NZB is an XML-based file for retrieving posts
>>> from NNTP (Usenet) servers."
>>>
>>> Is there anything in Mandriva that can make
>>> sense of it? Is it worth trying to make
>>> sense of it?
>>>
>>> TIA

<http://nzb.sourceforge.net/about/> <http://nzbmatrix.com/faq.php#2>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NZB>.

I'm not interested in bunny leeching (downloading binary content using
usenet) so that's the extent of my knowledge. If you aren't interested in
bunnies then NZB etc is of no use to you.

>> Any newsreader can read Usenet posts. A list of NZBs
>> (http://nzbsite.com/view-all-nzbs.php) lists DVDs, BIG stuff. Don't touch
>> them unless you have plenty of bandwidth. Searching the Mandriva packages
>> by description produced no match. I have no personal experience of NZBs,
>> but I have noticed that some newsreaders for binaries (e.g. altbinz, which
>> installed easily) will handle them.
> [snip]
>
> Mandriva 2008.0 has klibido and nget available, which apparently
> support nzb.
>
> The problem is trying to get any news articles from my ISP's
> news server with any news reader (or Leafnode). They list a
> few news readers / grabbers that they say work, but of course,
> they are Windows programs. Strangely they do not seem to
> support Microsoft's news reader or Mozilla's.
>
> I am unsure whether it is a failed migration of the old ISP's
> customers or failed nntp administration (or both).

Which ISP? There may be other users of it here who could comment, or a
more appropriate newsgroup - there are groups where news-servers or ISPs
are discussed, possibly in the relevant regional heirarchy (eg uk.* for
people in the UK). Some ISP news-servers have 'local' newsgroups
dedicated to discussing aspects of that ISP's service.

Have you tried accessing your ISP's news-server using telnet?

When ISPs talk about software or operating systems they 'support', it
usually means that they have someone on the 'helpdesk' who is prepared to
have a go helping customers who are having difficulty with that particular
software; it doesn't mean that other software can't be expected to work
(or indeed that the 'supported' software will work properly) with their
systems.

If your existing software works satisfactorily using Motzarella, then any
problems you have with your ISP's news-server are almost certainly at the
server end.

--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~

Peter D. wrote:

> on Thursday 06 March 2008 23:41
> in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva
> Doug Laidlaw wrote:
>
>> Peter D. wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> My ISP has recently been taken over and everything is
>>> "new and improved". I'm currently using Motzarella
>>> as a news server, and it is working quite well.
>>>
>>> My new ISP apparently supports NZB. I haven't
>>> quite worked out what that is yet. According to
>>> www.altbinz.net.wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions,
>>> "An NZB is an XML-based file for retrieving posts
>>> from NNTP (Usenet) servers."
>>>
>>> Is there anything in Mandriva that can make
>>> sense of it? Is it worth trying to make
>>> sense of it?
>>>
>>> TIA
>>>
>>>
>> Any newsreader can read Usenet posts. A list of NZBs
>> (http://nzbsite.com/view-all-nzbs.php) lists DVDs, BIG stuff. Don't
>> touch
>> them unless you have plenty of bandwidth. Searching the Mandriva
>> packages
>> by description produced no match. I have no personal experience of NZBs,
>> but I have noticed that some newsreaders for binaries (e.g. altbinz,
>> which installed easily) will handle them.
> [snip]
>
> Mandriva 2008.0 has klibido and nget available, which apparently
> support nzb.
>
> The problem is trying to get any news articles from my ISP's
> news server with any news reader (or Leafnode). They list a
> few news readers / grabbers that they say work, but of course,
> they are Windows programs. Strangely they do not seem to
> support Microsoft's news reader or Mozilla's.
>
> I am unsure whether it is a failed migration of the old ISP's
> customers or failed nntp administration (or both).
>
>
If they don't support Microsoft's news reader (outlook) or Mozillas's, they
would be losing a lot of business. If they are using the correct
protocols, any newsreader should work. The old command-line standby was
inn, and it is still available. nget is command-line as well. For
ordinary newsreading, the stock reader for KDE is knode, and for Gnome it
is pan. Both work OK for me. A new one, XPN is in the packages, and works
well. Binaries have slightly different requirements. Of course, you need
to configure them, but much the same as an email client.

If you mean RSS feeds (the square orange icon,) that is something different.
There are Knewsticker and Akregator for KDE, and many others on
freshmeat.net.

HTH,

Doug.

Doug Laidlaw wrote:

> Peter D. wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> My ISP has recently been taken over and everything is
>> "new and improved". I'm currently using Motzarella
>> as a news server, and it is working quite well.
>>
>> My new ISP apparently supports NZB. I haven't
>> quite worked out what that is yet. According to
>> www.altbinz.net.wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions,
>> "An NZB is an XML-based file for retrieving posts
>> from NNTP (Usenet) servers."
>>
>> Is there anything in Mandriva that can make
>> sense of it? Is it worth trying to make
>> sense of it?
>>
>> TIA
>>
>>
> Any newsreader can read Usenet posts. A list of NZBs
> (http://nzbsite.com/view-all-nzbs.php) lists DVDs, BIG stuff. Don't touch
> them unless you have plenty of bandwidth. Searching the Mandriva packages
> by description produced no match. I have no personal experience of NZBs,
> but I have noticed that some newsreaders for binaries (e.g. altbinz, which
> installed easily) will handle them.
>
> That site also has a link to alt.binaries. I played around with downloading
> binaries. With my download rate, things disappeared before I had completed
> the download. The site claims that they keep the files up a bit longer
> (over 110 days.) They were sent in sections, and you needed a program to
> stitch them together.
>
> Doug.
How did you get altbinz to work with wine? I installed wine and ran
altbinz.exe and it crashes wine almost immediately.
Eric

on Saturday 08 March 2008 00:59
in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva
Whiskers wrote:

> On 2008-03-07, Peter D. <psd@live.home.invalid> wrote:
>> on Thursday 06 March 2008 23:41
>> in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva
>> Doug Laidlaw wrote:
>>
>>> Peter D. wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> My ISP has recently been taken over and everything is
>>>> "new and improved". I'm currently using Motzarella
>>>> as a news server, and it is working quite well.
>>>>
>>>> My new ISP apparently supports NZB. I haven't
>>>> quite worked out what that is yet. According to
>>>> www.altbinz.net.wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions,
>>>> "An NZB is an XML-based file for retrieving posts
>>>> from NNTP (Usenet) servers."
>>>>
>>>> Is there anything in Mandriva that can make
>>>> sense of it? Is it worth trying to make
>>>> sense of it?
>>>>
>>>> TIA
>
> <http://nzb.sourceforge.net/about/> <http://nzbmatrix.com/faq.php#2>
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NZB>.
>
> I'm not interested in bunny leeching (downloading binary content using
> usenet) so that's the extent of my knowledge. If you aren't interested in
> bunnies then NZB etc is of no use to you.

I want to read news posts from my news server. I'll use wget or similar
to download Linux distributions.

It seems like someone has managed to hijack nntp as an alternate
method of downloading *large* binaries. It is of no interest to
me at all. I can get my ISOs easily now - and I don't see any
point is clogging up the nntp system.

>>> Any newsreader can read Usenet posts. A list of NZBs
>>> (http://nzbsite.com/view-all-nzbs.php) lists DVDs, BIG stuff. Don't
>>> touch
>>> them unless you have plenty of bandwidth. Searching the Mandriva
>>> packages
>>> by description produced no match. I have no personal experience of
>>> NZBs, but I have noticed that some newsreaders for binaries (e.g.
>>> altbinz, which installed easily) will handle them.
>> [snip]
>>
>> Mandriva 2008.0 has klibido and nget available, which apparently
>> support nzb.
>>
>> The problem is trying to get any news articles from my ISP's
>> news server with any news reader (or Leafnode). They list a
>> few news readers / grabbers that they say work, but of course,
>> they are Windows programs. Strangely they do not seem to
>> support Microsoft's news reader or Mozilla's.
>>
>> I am unsure whether it is a failed migration of the old ISP's
>> customers or failed nntp administration (or both).
>
> Which ISP?

Blitz, which owns G-node, Koalatelecom, Wix and others.

> There may be other users of it here who could comment, or a
> more appropriate newsgroup - there are groups where news-servers or ISPs
> are discussed, possibly in the relevant regional heirarchy (eg uk.* for
> people in the UK). Some ISP news-servers have 'local' newsgroups
> dedicated to discussing aspects of that ISP's service.

They have web forums.

They seem to have a news server that can not be used to read news,
only to "bunny leech". It all seems a bit perverse to me.

> Have you tried accessing your ISP's news-server using telnet?

I can download the newsgroup list, but I can't get the headers
because they don't give them out. Perverse.

> When ISPs talk about software or operating systems they 'support', it
> usually means that they have someone on the 'helpdesk' who is prepared to
> have a go helping customers who are having difficulty with that particular
> software; it doesn't mean that other software can't be expected to work
> (or indeed that the 'supported' software will work properly) with their
> systems.

Their news server does not support news readers only bunny leeching.
Perverse.

> If your existing software works satisfactorily using Motzarella, then any
> problems you have with your ISP's news-server are almost certainly at the
> server end.

Spot on.


--
sig goes here...
Peter D.

on Saturday 08 March 2008 01:31
in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva
Doug Laidlaw wrote:

[snip]
> If they don't support Microsoft's news reader (outlook) or Mozillas's,
> they would be losing a lot of business.

They don't support news *readers*, see other post.

> If they are using the correct
> protocols, any newsreader should work.
[snip]

They save bandwidth by not passing on any headers. Really perverse.

They seem to think that Google Groups is a news reader. <shudder>


--
sig goes here...
Peter D.

On 2008-03-09, Peter D. <psd@live.home.invalid> wrote:
> on Saturday 08 March 2008 00:59
> in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva
> Whiskers wrote:
>> On 2008-03-07, Peter D. <psd@live.home.invalid> wrote:
>>> on Thursday 06 March 2008 23:41
>>> in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva
>>> Doug Laidlaw wrote:
>>>> Peter D. wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> My ISP has recently been taken over and everything is
>>>>> "new and improved". I'm currently using Motzarella
>>>>> as a news server, and it is working quite well.
>>>>>
>>>>> My new ISP apparently supports NZB. I haven't
>>>>> quite worked out what that is yet. According to
>>>>> www.altbinz.net.wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions,
>>>>> "An NZB is an XML-based file for retrieving posts
>>>>> from NNTP (Usenet) servers."
>>>>>
>>>>> Is there anything in Mandriva that can make
>>>>> sense of it? Is it worth trying to make
>>>>> sense of it?
>>>>>
>>>>> TIA
>>
>> <http://nzb.sourceforge.net/about/> <http://nzbmatrix.com/faq.php#2>
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NZB>.
>>
>> I'm not interested in bunny leeching (downloading binary content using
>> usenet) so that's the extent of my knowledge. If you aren't interested in
>> bunnies then NZB etc is of no use to you.
>
> I want to read news posts from my news server. I'll use wget or similar
> to download Linux distributions.

If you're in no hurry, BitTorrent is good for getting the latest Mandriva.

> It seems like someone has managed to hijack nntp as an alternate
> method of downloading *large* binaries. It is of no interest to
> me at all. I can get my ISOs easily now - and I don't see any
> point is clogging up the nntp system.

Sadly not a recent development; binaries are probably the reason some ISPs
choose to provide no usenet service at all. The binary traffic swamps the
real text-only stuff. There are text-only news-servers though, and they
tend to be the most well-run and reliable.

[...]

>>> I am unsure whether it is a failed migration of the old ISP's
>>> customers or failed nntp administration (or both).
>>
>> Which ISP?
>
> Blitz, which owns G-node, Koalatelecom, Wix and others.

I can't log in to news.blitz.net, it says it requires authentication (but
only if I manage to issue a command to it before it times out - not a
proper 'challenge').

>> There may be other users of it here who could comment, or a
>> more appropriate newsgroup - there are groups where news-servers or ISPs
>> are discussed, possibly in the relevant regional heirarchy (eg uk.* for
>> people in the UK). Some ISP news-servers have 'local' newsgroups
>> dedicated to discussing aspects of that ISP's service.
>
> They have web forums.

<sigh>

> They seem to have a news server that can not be used to read news,
> only to "bunny leech". It all seems a bit perverse to me.

Perverse or incompetent. Or both.

[...]

I suppose it could be that your ISP is resigned to the fact that many of
its customers will download large volumes of usenet binaries whether or
not the ISP provides a 'local' news-server, and by having their own server
they can at least reduce the amount of traffic they have to pay for
between their own network and the rest of the world.

The extra work, storage, and bandwidth, for carrying text groups with
proper 'overview' files (to provide the 'headers') would be trivial
compared with carrying binary articles, but would still enable them to
make some saving in external traffic if more than a few of their customers
are using the text newsgroups via external NSPs. If they don't want to do
it themselves they might find another Autralian ISP already providing text
newsgroups which would be be willing to share.

--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~