News Servers

HaltAndCatchFire

HaltAndCatchFire

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Hi,
I am not new the web, but this is one area I have not yet ventured in! I would like to know what all the fuss is about and how to use it and so on.

I have a IS account and I read on a lot of posts round the net that IS has a good NS.

So please would any one give me a nice overview of what exactly a news server is and how to set up to be able to connect to the IS news server?

Tanx.
 
USENet is one of the oldest ways of transferring data in the form of "news atricles".

See it as a big forum with different threads or topics such as :

comp.os.linux - This would be a forum for discussing Linux related matters
comp.os.microsoft - Another forum but for M$ products...
alt.binaries.(insert anything here) - would be for binary articles

The binary articles are used to transfer UUencoded files (like multiple .ZIP/.RAR files etc.)

What you would need is a news reader (i use linux, so PAN works great), but you could try Agent99 or even Mozilla or Outlook's news readers to connect.

The 1st connect will download all the forums you can subscribe to (this takes a while, since last count was over 80,000). Once you have the list, subscribe to the feeds you want, and start downloading/reading/replying...

Simple as that :)

I don't have the IS news servers (probably nntp.is.co.za or news.is.co.za), but I'm sure if you phone them they would be able to help :)
 
It will also help to search these forums. Suffice to say that IS servers may be good, but for anything biggish ie greater than half a meg, you will have to use overseas servers, because local servers drop too many pieces of the content.
 
ernstn said:
It will also help to search these forums. Suffice to say that IS servers may be good, but for anything biggish ie greater than half a meg, you will have to use overseas servers, because local servers drop too many pieces of the content.
Click to expand...

Agreed - use servers such as newscene.com or the like - it's a pay service, but the retention is great and they don't miss crucial parts of threads due to lack of hard disk space...
 
HaZrD said:
Agreed - use servers such as newscene.com or the like - it's a pay service, but the retention is great and they don't miss crucial parts of threads due to lack of hard disk space...
Click to expand...
Their prices seem a bit steep to me when similar services such as easynews are less than half the price.

If you do chose a pay service make sure it allows as many concurrent downloads as possible as well as giving you the facility to zip together all of the rar/whatever files. Retention - the time a file will be available - is key. I'd look for a minimum of a month.
 
Funny I haven't had a corrupt/incomplete download yet from news.is.co.za, and at about 30gb downloaded last month that's not too bad (multiple dvd-iso's and the like).

Can't compare them to international servers since I've never used one, but it's decent enough to put your local bandwidth to good use.

Edit: Oh yeah, I use Grabit (http://www.shemes.com). It does a nice job of combining the messages, resuming batches etc and you can import .nzb files if you don't want to download all the headers.
 
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Is anyone else having problems connecting to IS news server today? I use Newsbin Pro and it fails to connect to the server since this morning. This server has good retention.
 
Does anyone know if uunet has another one besides news.uunet.co.za?
 
VJB 449 said:
Is anyone else having problems connecting to IS news server today? I use Newsbin Pro and it fails to connect to the server since this morning. This server has good retention.
Click to expand...

There seem to be problems at the moment with news.is.co.za.
 
ernstn said:
It will also help to search these forums. Suffice to say that IS servers may be good, but for anything biggish ie greater than half a meg, you will have to use overseas servers, because local servers drop too many pieces of the content.
Click to expand...

This is not true, the IS NNTP Server has better retention than some of the pay services offered in Europe and the USA. I have used a number of them so I know...

There were a few problems with the IS News server today, but this is the first time I have experienced this and I have been with IS for over a month.
 
Yeah, the IS news server is great. I've successfully downloaded binary files that were almost 70 days old! The speed is also amazing (maxes out my line, except during office hours), and I've never tried to download something that wasn't available on their server.

Unfortunately it seems to be having some problems at the moment :(

Edit: Forgot to say that you guys should check out NewsLeecher (www.newsleecher.com) - I prefer it to GrabIt or NewsBin Pro.

Edit2: Yay! IS's news server is working 100% again :D
 
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