Saix Newsgroups! Are there any??

Freak_c

Freak_c

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Hi All

I have a Cybersmart account (saix) and was wondering if they have a news group server like IS. My work has IS so been using that to download, but when I go home and try to continue the download it does not connect.

Any help Thanks.
 
I think there's news.saix.net but I don't think its really worth using.
 
You know that little button on the top that says Search? Just use it next time please, there has been lots of previous threads about this.

And once again, yes, news.saix.net is a SAIX newsserver, but there's almost no binary retention. It would be useless to use to download anything.
 
Armizael said:
You know that little button on the top that says Search? Just use it next time please, there has been lots of previous threads about this.

And once again, yes, news.saix.net is a SAIX newsserver, but there's almost no binary retention. It would be useless to use to download anything.
Click to expand...

lol, and cut MyADSL's traffic by 90%? God forbid!
 
Armizael said:
You know that little button on the top that says Search? Just use it next time please, there has been lots of previous threads about this.

And once again, yes, news.saix.net is a SAIX newsserver, but there's almost no binary retention. It would be useless to use to download anything.
Click to expand...

Give us a Wiki entry son! :D
 
I use easynews and have never had problems. The retention time of local newsgroups is non existent and most of the parts are missing. I'll never go back to using NNTP.
 
gregmcc said:
I use easynews and have never had problems. The retention time of local newsgroups is non existent and most of the parts are missing. I'll never go back to using NNTP.
Click to expand...
Although . . . you do get an additional 25% download capacity from easynews if you use NNTP. :D
 
gregmcc said:
I use easynews and have never had problems. The retention time of local newsgroups is non existent and most of the parts are missing. I'll never go back to using NNTP.
Click to expand...

I've never not been able to get something from IS' news server. The 2 or 3 missing parts once in a blue moon are easily repaired with a single par2 file.
 
Aggh - but the overhead of all the NNTP headers is 25% anyway - so you don't score anything :) I use the zip manager and then download via 80/443/21/25 - take your pick :)
 
gregmcc said:
Aggh - but the overhead of all the NNTP headers is 25% anyway - so you don't score anything :) I use the zip manager and then download via 80/443/21/25 - take your pick :)
Click to expand...
I'm no expert - so this is pure speculation - but dont the headers only come into play when you're loading the newsgroup messages locally? If I use zip manager and download the NZB directly into my newsreader am I still downloading headers?
 
bwana said:
I'm no expert - so this is pure speculation - but dont the headers only come into play when you're loading the newsgroup messages locally? If I use zip manager and download the NZB directly into my newsreader am I still downloading headers?
Click to expand...

Some header information is still present in the articles, depending on which method you use to download.

There are two ways: 220 article <msgid> and 220 body <msgid>.

Article downloads the entire article, i.e. headers such as who sent it, filename, to which groups, etc. as well as the body, whereas body only downloads the body of the article.

Only problem is on IS news server I sometimes get "440 dont have it" errors when using the body method, while the article method downloads the article. Maybe something to do with being cached or not?
 
qinglung said:
Some header information is still present in the articles, depending on which method you use to download.

There are two ways: 220 article <msgid> and 220 body <msgid>.

Article downloads the entire article, i.e. headers such as who sent it, filename, to which groups, etc. as well as the body, whereas body only downloads the body of the article.

Only problem is on IS news server I sometimes get "440 dont have it" errors when using the body method, while the article method downloads the article. Maybe something to do with being cached or not?
Click to expand...
As mentioned easynews gives you an additional 25% if you download via nntp rather than via http - Would these headers account for as much as 25% more traffic or would you still be scoring by using nntp.
 
From what I've seen the header of an article is about 1kB, could probably be bigger, but I can't see that giving you a saving of 25%.

Maybe they regard you not having to download the entire group's headers as the saving.

I've also seen that for NNTP there is minimal uploading as the protocol doesn't have that much in terms of control and packet acknowledgment, etc., whereas with HTTP that all adds to the uploading side of it. But again, for that I don't see a saving of 25%.

I'm no expert either, so I could be wrong on some the facts, but that is what I have gathered so far.
 
@qinglung - thanks for the info. )
 
OK, just saw what you meant with 25% saving, from the Easynews site: "NNTP downloads are discounted by 25% to account for encoding overhead and headers are free."

Still, I don't see the amount of overhead being that much. Overhead from using yEnc is about 1-3%, older encoding techniques was in the region of 30%, maybe they still take these into account.

Other things to consider is, as I said, NNTP don't have that much control built into the protocol, so if an article times out, the article must be downloaded from the start. With an article maybe 700kB big, it's not that big a loss, unless you get lots of time-outs. I would assume the connection to Easynews to be good so time-outs shouldn't be a problem. (Uncached stuff on the IS news server is prone to time-outs.)

Easiest way to check this would be to download something using HTTP and then again using NNTP and check the usage for both. (Can't really find anything on the web discussing the pros and cons of the two protocols.)
 
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Doh, it was all written in the Easynews FAQ.

"In short, UUEncode is the original standard created to allow 8-bit data to be posted to UseNet which was originally designed to only support 7 bits. The overhead from this increases posted file size (and thus amount of data transfered) by about 33%. Just about any newsreader should be able to interprety UUE. To compenstate for UUE overhead, EasyNews only counts 75% of data transferred from NNTP.

yEnc was designed to allow 8-bit binaries to be posted with minimal overhead. The overhead due to yEnc is about 1%-2%."
 
thanks for the info - you learn something new every day :)

I dont have to worry about the 25% extra though, I can't even up my normal allocation. Filling out the questionaire gives you 2gb extra each month. plus they also give you extra gigs for continious signup - 1gb extra a month for 0-1yrs signup, 2gb for 1-2 yrs etc etc. AND come Christmas time they throw in another 20gig for free!! Wish i could see off some of my b/w :)
 
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