What is a new server eg "news://news.saix.net"

Scooby_Doo

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What exactly is a news server and what can u do with it? Don't really know where i should have put this post so sue me if i posted it in the wrong place.
 
newsgroup
Sometimes referred to as USENET, newsgroups are really discussion groups. There are literally hundreds and hundreds, on nearly any topic imaginable. There is a sort of loose organization, and some groups are actually moderated, but for the most part the newsgroups are a free-for-all of information and file sharing, mixed in with advertisements and scams. Some newsgroups are rarely posted to, while others get hundreds of new postings every day.

newsreader
A newsreader is a piece of software that lets you read USENET newsgroups.

news server
A news server is the computer at your ISP (like OpenWeb) that runs the necessary software that gathers and distributes newsgroup information to the ISP's subscribers.
 
I wish I'd taken the time to delve into usenet sooner. :D
 
Usenet is one part of the net that many South Africans seem to know little about, but it is a source of many things amazing. I think this is because SA news servers tend to be a bit feeble, given that a full Usenet feed is about 200Gb per day, and no-one wants pay to get that to SA every day!

When I still had access to the IS server ( hermes? ) they were good on the text feeds, but blocked 99.9999% of the binaries.

I recommend a USA based news feed. You can get a 20Gb/month account for about US$20 per month. Look at:

http://www.newshosting.com/
http://www.giganews.com/

If you look around these sites you can see lists of the groups that they carry. Giganews is seriously complete, Newshosting a tad faster but depends on your route to their servers I suppose.

Giganews currently runs about 104,000 groups.

Now why would you want it? Well I regard Usenet as being the Alice's Restaurant of the net - "You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant". Excepting Alice of course. In fact, maybe EVEN ALICE!! Some reasons:

- A good friend's wife has Multiple Sclerosis, and there is a lot of support and advice there.

- I program part time and there is a great support group.

- USA servers offer access on many sneaky ports, some even proper HTTP access

- alt.binaries.* Like alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 and all its sub groups. Like all the variants of alt.binaries.w@r3z, alt.binaries.games and alt.binaries.emulators. Plenty pR0n too if that is your thing.

Like I said, everything you want. ( I never understood this big P2P craze - its all there on Usenet, at good speeds on ADSL too ).

If you are on a PC I recommend Forte Agent as a newsreader - used it for years, and there is a free version too at:

http://www.forteinc.com/

(I know other users have other favourites too.)

Of course, if you have a 3Gb hard cap, then it ain't much use to you I suppose. ;)
 
Peter_J said:
Usenet is one part of the net that many South Africans seem to know little about, but it is a source of many things amazing. I think this is because SA news servers tend to be a bit feeble, given that a full Usenet feed is about 200Gb per day, and no-one wants pay to get that to SA every day!

When I still had access to the IS server ( hermes? ) they were good on the text feeds, but blocked 99.9999% of the binaries.

I recommend a USA based news feed. You can get a 20Gb/month account for about US$20 per month. Look at:

http://www.newshosting.com/
http://www.giganews.com/

If you look around these sites you can see lists of the groups that they carry. Giganews is seriously complete, Newshosting a tad faster but depends on your route to their servers I suppose.

Giganews currently runs about 104,000 groups.

Now why would you want it? Well I regard Usenet as being the Alice's Restaurant of the net - "You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant". Excepting Alice of course. In fact, maybe EVEN ALICE!! Some reasons:

- A good friend's wife has Multiple Sclerosis, and there is a lot of support and advice there.

- I program part time and there is a great support group.

- USA servers offer access on many sneaky ports, some even proper HTTP access

- alt.binaries.* Like alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 and all its sub groups. Like all the variants of alt.binaries.w@r3z, alt.binaries.games and alt.binaries.emulators. Plenty pR0n too if that is your thing.

Like I said, everything you want. ( I never understood this big P2P craze - its all there on Usenet, at good speeds on ADSL too ).

If you are on a PC I recommend Forte Agent as a newsreader - used it for years, and there is a free version too at:

http://www.forteinc.com/

(I know other users have other favourites too.)

Of course, if you have a 3Gb hard cap, then it ain't much use to you I suppose. ;)

I use easynews.com which charges 10$ for 30 gigabytes. At the moment my gig credit with them sits at +- 150 gigs but because of Telkom, there is no way that I can fully utilise them. They also have a browser interface and download on port 80 which makes sure that shaping does not influence the download speed from them
 
If you're wanting to explore USENET then I'd suggest you look at EasyNews - www.easynews.com. They offer 20gig accounts for $10 a pop, and it's month to month so you don't get locked into some bollocksy 6-month contract. Also, your gigs carry over to the next month, and they never expire.

The best feature by far has to be that they provide a web interface into their news servers. This means that you can browse all posting over the web. They also auto-uncompress large posts. If someone posts a linux ISO that is 700mb, they must split it into 15mb chunks to meet the maximum post size allowed by most news servers (btw, easynews now supports 50mb chunks). You would have to find all, say, 49 chunks to be able to uncompress them back into the original 700mb file.

Easynews solves this problem by auto-decompressing files for you, so that you can grab the whole .iso file in one download. Also, using the web interface means you can download over HTTP and avoid nasty port shaping that NNTP and P2P experiences. Nice, you get your full speed for a change.

There are loads of other features, too vast to mention, except this one: They have live 24-hour support. You can phone them using VOIP, you can chat to them over MSN or you can chat to them using a nifty web-based chat app.

There you go. They should be paying me for this.

EDIT: spelling
 
ernstn said:
I use easynews.com which charges 10$ for 30 gigabytes. At the moment my gig credit with them sits at +- 150 gigs but because of Telkom, there is no way that I can fully utilise them. They also have a browser interface and download on port 80 which makes sure that shaping does not influence the download speed from them

Beat me to it! :)
 
was a time when local news servers were being raped!!!
included in your isp subscription...
but it all changed, no we have to look elsewhere....
those were the days
 
par(ity) files can be your best friend :)

Easynews looks like its been around awhile (since 1994 apparently) so its not like they're going to take your money and do a runner or something.
 
so the SAIX one is cr@p? I maybe gettin an IS uncapped from datapro soon, don't really wanna pay for a news server until i understand how to use it. Will the IS one be better? And is it normal for the news server to run through outlook express 6?
 
Scooby_Doo said:
so the SAIX one is cr@p? I maybe gettin an IS uncapped from datapro soon, don't really wanna pay for a news server until i understand how to use it. Will the IS one be better? And is it normal for the news server to run through outlook express 6?
It pretty much depends on what you'll be looking for. If you're going to be looking for binary download then I'd go for one of these pay services as they have a better retention - so files will stay up there longer. Also some have some nice features - eg a search engine that lets you group individual files into a single zip file making downloading a snap.

IMO its going to be a lot easier for you to start with a news server rather than trying to hunt through incomplete archives on IS or SAIX. Just make sure if you're going to part with $'s that the people you're giving it to are legit.
 
Ok so i was just looking about and some of the things i download are just lots of letters and symbols are these files binary downloads? If i wanted to "download" them how do i use or group or add all the different binary pages together. copy paste


here is an example of a few lines of what i got.

=ybegin part=31 line=128 size=50000000 name=dev-4.r53
=ypart begin=19200001 end=19840000
·6±Ñ-v.Fª8såà)x4Vp}$Ä.~!uªÕÂ9D«%â7\j-áÿ)-§"£ >JêÛ Ðîö/fÏfÀ^½Ýá`ïÇO(%A_¦íQ&'=}`=Jó<FTínå÷Tt$f;#cY'ÿƼ®=JéM4;îNj¥~)2ÖP çOÀô'¸«5¢-å=}MØk£\ãìiü©"{'óhXÐÒÈͧ-¢ú¨
¤ÌL v?¢%Züoàû5'wÒû"ù)jë@³êd©ØÄ÷}Ó 6£V=MþÅV?Û ÁÄâl´ÚÑðkÔ=}ÖÐâ5)RÔFb°AÈÿhý¿H©R5Ry[ÑR~×gu¥ÏíCw(ÂG©}su éÏ?k©ßþàw/6Â;¨gÈ-
z'Mñ7ö.ÒrÖüTÿÉÚgݪÐD%~¿³RïªÊ#­þvgF א¨øâ5P<·?¶+£KûÇZS¶í¹ù4Üa6ÐfïUL. zÞJrd·"=}t);T,ù'*Û_¡"(V;]úÏÿ'rô¶}º{&äÃ+vJJ:+Ë#¬B¿
-­ësªT§^øë*~Úä¹½'7Þ eÔðà!Xé>ÛïP¬¶J)EçÜê"Y¬éðf)Èüñ¥Ý¾\ðó­"¢¤I]|=M~$ˬöþåÍ©ã£sãô2ôþÂ0 &ÅGß 0R8Å''.¿Êø.gzTØKÙÞz'Joâ8SÄ`z ½Þ2°´üëç®­o Ô÷ì¥q%\)>]C<Ì©t53ø©ïÑYÓ@zY[Txº¸Z^ªó?òÝÄÑ>ì0n§çäØ÷_fÐÿ_ã$À"ÿÑ'cöýá'¢4;+
ÕªKÁ¡¼ÊÕ÷'Ó"T)ÁÁ'26À!',·û4Ò(ù못$`¨í5@½c$q-*ì=}S@?f?h#9-Nxa$g¹jQ¡?w'gÆ
 
u gonna need a news reader to download all the goodies on newsserver.
check eaynews.com, they have a free one on their website.
also use google (its quite good search engine) to look for news readers.
 
that file is part 53 of a rar archive, each piece is 50mb in size. what you are seeing is the silly outlook express showing you the contents of the file itself.

for newsreaders, there are loads. I have been using newsbin pro for a while now. Pretty good.

As far as news servers are concerned, retention rate is a very important aspect to me. No good only having pieces of a file available.
 
news server access via adsl

I need some help. Seems there are two main servers that everybody access in South Africa. News.is.co.za and News.saix.net. Everybody have different names like news.datapro.co.za and news.axxess.co.za, etc etc, but they all look at the same servers. Now, can anybody tells me if it is true that if you use ADSL you can only access the saix network ? We are using both a diginet line and an ADSL line at work, so can access both. News.is.co.za is FAR superior in term of messages and the period they keep them. Which service provider uses news.is.co.za through adsl ?
 
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