I've heard about that for a while now.
Is it faster than downloading torrents? Is there a nice, easy tutorial website?
I don't feel like surfing around for hours to figure this one out.
Any sugggestions? Thoughts?
-istp
How do you use Usenet?
Moderators: North Shore, sky's the limit, sepia, Sulako
-
200hr Wonder
- Rank 10
- Posts: 2212
- Joined: Tue Apr 26, 2005 1:52 pm
- Location: CYVR
- Contact:
Re: How do you use Usenet?
Well Usenet is ancient, as old as the internet so it may seem a little antiquated and odd. Be here is the brief overview.
Usenet is a text only service so everything has to be re-encoded as text. And it has a very small (by today's standards) message size. As such there are many many many parts to say a 1 GB movie. Upwards of a thousand. The way it works is you create what is essentially an email message that gets put into a giant public inbox, sort of, but it gets posted to your local usenet server and from there filters up the tree and down the tree to the person downloading it's server. So as such you need a few things.
1. A good server - not all ISPs have descent usenet servers, some are terrible they miss messages or they do not keep them around very long. They also don't necessarily have the groups you want. There are pay for servers that have good retention, good groups, and good completion but you do pay a monthly fee. From $5.00 got 5GB to $29.99 for unlimited downloads. Oh and Rogers recently dropped usenet support IE you do not get usenet access with your account.
2. A groups downloader software, back when I was a windows guy I used Forte Agent, and it worked well.
3. When uploading many peaces there are additional files created called PAR or PAR2. What these are is through black magic they can recreate a few missing peaces should your server drop them. QuickPAR is what I use to use for windows.
Basically you find the group that has the content you are looking for. Usually something like alt.binaries.something.
You subscribe to the group
You download the parts of the file you want
You use PAR to checksum/join/and create the file you downloaded
You unrar the file if required
You got your file.
Usenet is a text only service so everything has to be re-encoded as text. And it has a very small (by today's standards) message size. As such there are many many many parts to say a 1 GB movie. Upwards of a thousand. The way it works is you create what is essentially an email message that gets put into a giant public inbox, sort of, but it gets posted to your local usenet server and from there filters up the tree and down the tree to the person downloading it's server. So as such you need a few things.
1. A good server - not all ISPs have descent usenet servers, some are terrible they miss messages or they do not keep them around very long. They also don't necessarily have the groups you want. There are pay for servers that have good retention, good groups, and good completion but you do pay a monthly fee. From $5.00 got 5GB to $29.99 for unlimited downloads. Oh and Rogers recently dropped usenet support IE you do not get usenet access with your account.
2. A groups downloader software, back when I was a windows guy I used Forte Agent, and it worked well.
3. When uploading many peaces there are additional files created called PAR or PAR2. What these are is through black magic they can recreate a few missing peaces should your server drop them. QuickPAR is what I use to use for windows.
Basically you find the group that has the content you are looking for. Usually something like alt.binaries.something.
You subscribe to the group
You download the parts of the file you want
You use PAR to checksum/join/and create the file you downloaded
You unrar the file if required
You got your file.
Cheers,
200hr Wonder
200hr Wonder
Re: How do you use Usenet?
I used it for about a month, but didn't see the value in it compared to torrents. If you really want a ton a speed then go with usenets. Torrents work for me. The learning curve can be slight, but I managed to learn it. 
Re: How do you use Usenet?
200hr wonder has a great summary - I'll go into some painful detail for you 
I mostly use ftp, but sometimes I use usenet. It's more private (ie secure) than torrents, and you don't have to upload anything in return so you save bandwidth.
I use a program called Grabit. I'm on Cogeco internet, and they have their own usenet server, so when I download from usenet I am maxxing out my download speed.
The thing about usenet binaries is that sometimes they aren't all complete. To make up for this, most large uploads also have "par2" files (.par2) which contain information that will help rebuild missing parts of files.
When I download from usenet, I let grabit do its thing, then I check the files the built-in par checker in grabit, or with an other program called quickpar (freeware). It will let me know which files are complete, and which files are missing pieces, and how many pieces of the files are missing. If I'm missing say 10 blocks, I will download a related .par file that's at least ten blocks in size, and it will rebuild the missing blocks in the files I want. A pa2r file will look like this: filename.vol003+04.PAR2. In this case, the par2 file contains 4 blocks, so if you are missing 4 or less, you can download this file and it will rebuild your missing pieces. If you are missing more than 4 blocks, simply download par2 files that add up to the amount you need, ie if you are missing 10 blocks, you can download an 8 block file and a 2 block file, or a 4block file and a 6 block file etc.
The learning curve does take some getting used to - when you download a .torrent, you are far more likely to be downloading the complete set of files you need, but with usenet binaries there's a good chance you will have to download supplementary par files to rebuild / replace missing parts.
For a good usenet search website, I use binsearch.info.
Oh, there's another type of file you might want to get to know - it's called an .nzb file. When you download an .nzb file and load it into grabit, it will automatically queue all the files in that particular release and download them, rather than you having to manually select each file for download. For example, if a movie is split into 50 parts, if it has a related .nzb file and you load it, it will load all 50 parts for download rather than you having to click 50 times to download 50 files.
If you want to totally get your nerd on, check out this article on how par2 files work. They don't contain any of the actual file information, and it doesn't matter which (related) par2 files you use as long as they contain enough blocks to replace the missing ones. It's pretty interesting actually*
http://www.slyck.com/Newsgroups_Guide_PAR_PAR2_Files
I mostly use ftp, but sometimes I use usenet. It's more private (ie secure) than torrents, and you don't have to upload anything in return so you save bandwidth.
I use a program called Grabit. I'm on Cogeco internet, and they have their own usenet server, so when I download from usenet I am maxxing out my download speed.
The thing about usenet binaries is that sometimes they aren't all complete. To make up for this, most large uploads also have "par2" files (.par2) which contain information that will help rebuild missing parts of files.
When I download from usenet, I let grabit do its thing, then I check the files the built-in par checker in grabit, or with an other program called quickpar (freeware). It will let me know which files are complete, and which files are missing pieces, and how many pieces of the files are missing. If I'm missing say 10 blocks, I will download a related .par file that's at least ten blocks in size, and it will rebuild the missing blocks in the files I want. A pa2r file will look like this: filename.vol003+04.PAR2. In this case, the par2 file contains 4 blocks, so if you are missing 4 or less, you can download this file and it will rebuild your missing pieces. If you are missing more than 4 blocks, simply download par2 files that add up to the amount you need, ie if you are missing 10 blocks, you can download an 8 block file and a 2 block file, or a 4block file and a 6 block file etc.
The learning curve does take some getting used to - when you download a .torrent, you are far more likely to be downloading the complete set of files you need, but with usenet binaries there's a good chance you will have to download supplementary par files to rebuild / replace missing parts.
For a good usenet search website, I use binsearch.info.
Oh, there's another type of file you might want to get to know - it's called an .nzb file. When you download an .nzb file and load it into grabit, it will automatically queue all the files in that particular release and download them, rather than you having to manually select each file for download. For example, if a movie is split into 50 parts, if it has a related .nzb file and you load it, it will load all 50 parts for download rather than you having to click 50 times to download 50 files.
If you want to totally get your nerd on, check out this article on how par2 files work. They don't contain any of the actual file information, and it doesn't matter which (related) par2 files you use as long as they contain enough blocks to replace the missing ones. It's pretty interesting actually*
http://www.slyck.com/Newsgroups_Guide_PAR_PAR2_Files
