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NewsBin FAQLast update: June 9, 2003 |
If you are having problems configuring NewsBin for the first time, read the Installation Guide
Version 4.1 is nagging me and this is my first day I've used it!
I just upgraded and now NewsBin doesn't work, no downloads, no MOTD. What's up?
I keep getting "Connect to Server Failed", what could be causing this?
I cannot add groups in the "Groups" tab. It says "Locked while running"
Woah!, I dragged my thumbnail window off the screen and can't get it back!
I can't figure out how to access newsgroups and files from your home page Newsbin.com.
Can I run multiple instances of NewsBin on the same machine?
I run with mulitple servers, how can I prioritize my servers?
How do I figure out the best setting for the "First Time Records" setting?
My machine crashes under heavy loads when running NewsBin. What's up?
NewsBin works best on Windows 2000, and Windows XP systems. NewsBin will work with most Windows 98, 98SE, and ME systems. It may not work under Windows 95 anymore and, since Microsoft no longer supports that OS, neither do we. NewsBin is not compatible with any 16 bit version of windows because it is a true 32 bit Multithreaded application. NewsBin may not work on windows emulators or virtual machines under different operating systems. We have reports that versions 4.06 and prior work under Wine and VMWare but we do not test on these platforms and do not support them. We have had reports that version 4.1 runs under VMWare version 4 but not Wine. We have had many requests to create a Linux version it is currently under development. A version for Mac OSX will be available as well.
The registration information needs to be typed in EXACTLY as is appears in registration email message. This includes upper and lower case characters, dashes, and spaces. The best bet is to copy and paste the information from your email message into the fields found under the "Register" menu option. For version 4.0, this includes the "First Name" field, the "Last Name" field, and the "Registration Code" field. To copy and paste, highlight the text in the email, hit CTRL-C (for copy), then go to the field in the NewsBin registration screen, click on the field, and hit CTRL-V (for paste). When you have correctly entered the information, click on the button labeled "Click to Finish Registration". Then, close and restart NewsBin for the registration to take affect. You can verify your registration by checking under the "Help", "About" menu option. Version 4.1 allows you to copy and paste the entire key, including dashes, instead of separating the key into the 5 individual sections.
Common problems:
If you still can't get it to work, fill out our tech support form and send us the key information you are trying to use. We can then check our key server logs and see what might be wrong.
There is a bug in 4.1 that requires you to restart NewsBin after the first time you run it so the 10 day free trial gets started correctly. This is fixed in version 4.12
I just upgraded and now NewsBin doesn't work. No downloads, no MOTD. What's up?
If you are running a personal firewall, such as Zone Alarm, each new release of NewsBin looks like a new program to the firewall. You need to tell your firewall to let NewsBin out again.
Either your server name is incorrect or you are running a firewall that is not letting NewsBin out. Your news server name should look something like "news.myisp.com". A simple way to check if your news server is valid and that your PC has access to the server is to telnet into the server from the windows command line. Type "telnet news.myisp.com 119" (no quotes) and, if the server name is correct and you are not being blocked, you should see news server information like this:
200 Powered by WebUseNet -- http://www.webusenet.com/ (Tornado v1.0.1.233)
If this works and NewsBin still doesn't, look for a software firewall setting that is keeping NewsBin specifically from getting out. NewsBin needs ports 53 (DNS), 80 (HTTP), and 119 (NNTP) open to function.
Frequently, upgrading NewsBin will look like new software to your firewall which would require you to tell your firewall to let NewsBin through again.
The servers and groups are checked in the order in which they appear under the "News Servers" and "Groups" tabs. You can reorder them in these screens by either sorting using the column headers or by clicking and dragging them into place. Do not confuse the Group/Server Window with the "Group" and "Server" Configuration screens. The order is not specified there. Look for the window containing two tabs, one labeled "Groups", and the other labeled "Servers". This is where you change the processing order.
As many as you have RAM for. We've tested it with as many as 1000000 records with no problems. Of course we have 512MB or RAM, too! If your machine is slowing down and your memory usage is over them amount of RAM in your system, then you are trying to process too many groups simultaneously or your "First Time Records" setting is too high for your machine to handle.
We use the subject field to parse out the number of records in a post. This works most of the time because more often than not people follow the "standard" for uploading binaries. To catch the other 20%, we just give a post the benefit of the doubt and look for binaries in it anyway. In the past the method worked wonderfully 'cause the spammers weren't as annoying as they are now. With all the spam, it's not quite as efficient. In all cases we try to err on the side of caution and at least look for binaries in a post. Starting with 3.3, we cap a post at 50 lines. If there isn't the beginning of a file in the first 50 lines we dump the download and go on. This could be a problem if someone posts a bunch of text with a binary attachment, let us know if you see too many slipping through this crack.
If you're annoyed by all the HTML crap, turn on the built-in filtering capability using .htm and .html.
There is a setting in the "Options" screen called "First Time Records" (FTR for short). This specifies the number of records NewsBin will download the first time it processes a specific newsgroup. Each subsequent time NewsBin processes the group, only records newer than the last run will be downloaded.
If your FTR is set too small, you will not get all the headers the first time, especially in multipart groups. For example, if you are processing an MP3 group with an average of 50 parts per post and your FTR is set to 1000, you will only see 20 headers. In this case, you should set the FTR to 10000 or more. For picture groups containing single part posts, you would see 1000 headers.
NOTE: FTR is broken in version 4.1. NewsBin always downloads all headers the first time a newsgroup is accessed and will then download only new headers after the first time.
NewsBin has two levels of duplicate detection. First, it will not download headers of any post you have previously downloaded. This information is stored in the postid.dat file in your NewsBin directory. Second, NewsBin creates a signature of the first 22K of each file downloaded and saves it in the signature.dat file. If, in the future, the same file is attached to a different post, NewsBin will identify it and kill the download automatically. A "D" (for duplicate) will be displayed in a yellow box to the left of the subject of the post. The signature.dat file is most effective on picture files but may accidentally filter MP3 or Movie files because 22K may not be enough to uniquely identify them. If you download only large file, we suggest you turn the signature cache off. Both the signature cache and postid cache can be turned off under the "Utilities" menu option.
NewsBin connects to a Usenet NNTP News Server to download binaries. AOL does not provide NNTP News for its customers. It provides access to news groups through a proprietary interface for the AOL client software only.
If you wish to use NewsBin with AOL as your ISP, you will need AOL version 4.0 or higher and you will need access to a real News Server. Go to our Free News Server Page or sign up with a pay news service like Easynews, UseNetServer, Onlynews, or Supernews.
Yes! We have tested NewsBin extensively with large MPG and MP3 files that have been posted in 10-100 parts and it works great! NewsBin will even assemble multiple parts across servers if you have multiple servers defined. For example, if Server A has all but #7 of a 10 part post and Server B has only 7, 8, 9, and 10, NewsBin is smart enough to pull #7 off of Server B and put the post together for you.
NOTE: NewsBin will not work with Multi-file, Multi-part posts. This is not a common method of posting but some posters do this. An example is 30 small picture files split among 3 posts.
This means NewsBin is currently running, trying to act on the currently selected news
groups. Click the "Stop" button on the main tab and try again. If
NewsBin seems to do this every time you start it up, check to make sure that auto start
mode is disabled. You can find this under the "Setup" menu option.
If there is a checkmark next to "Auto Startup Mode" then click on it to
de-select it.
Nope. Microsoft uses a different authentication
scheme than other news servers. We would support it but, from what we
have heard, MSN pulled support for binary groups so NewsBin is useless there
anyway.
If you mess up your NewsBin windows by dragging them around and off the screen, this utility will put them all back together for you. Just close NewsBin, unzip nbwinfix.zip and run nbwinfix.exe. The next time you run NewsBin, it will be fixed.
The download continues in the background until complete, you just don't see the thumbnail anymore. We are thinking about changing this so that the thumbnail is just grayed out until it completes and then it will disappear.
If you drag the NewsBin executable to your desktop and mistakenly copy the program instead of creating a shortcut, NewsBin will execute from the desktop and create all its working files there. If you want to create a shortcut, make sure you see a little shortcut arrow instead of a plus sign (or nothing) when you drag and drop.
There are two ways to do this. If there is just one file you want, right-click on the header and choose "Force Download". If there are a number of files you want to re-download, go under the utilities menu item and disable the "Signature Cache" and "Post ID Cache". This will turn off both of NewsBin's duplicate detection functions. Starting with version 3.2 and above, you can right-click on the post and select the "Force Download" option. This will override duplicate detection and any filters that have been applied.
In the "Groups" screen, NewsBin defaults to a "Binaries" filter. If you uncheck the "Group Name Search" option, you will see all the newsgroups.
There are two places you can apply subject filters, on the main screen and under the "Spam Filters" button on the "Subject Filters" screen. The subject filter on the main screen acts immediately when you type some characters in and applies the filter on the subjects in the "Post List". This filter overrides any other filters that may be set. If you want to show only subjects with the word "cars" in it, type the word "cars" in the Subject Filter field.
The filters available under the "Spam Filters" menu are much more powerful. You can apply multiple filters to get an "OR" effect and it supports most regular expression commands. Filters can be applied to either be accepted when matching or rejected when matching your filter criteria. NewsBin employs regular expression parsing which allows you to create powerful expressions for searching for matches on character strings. For example, if you wanted headers with the word "car" showing up anywhere, you would apply the filter ".*car.*". (Do no include the quote signs). If you wanted headers that started with the word car, you would apply the filter "^car.*". The same method works for the filename filter. If you never want to receive EXE files, put in .*\.exe as a filter in the "reject matching" area. More details are on our regular expression page here.
NewsBin is not a service, it is software. You use the software to access an NNTP news server where you can download pictures, movies, and music. AOL does not provide this service, you must sign up with a commercial news server. Please read our web page to AOL users here.
NewsBin was not designed to run multiple times on the same machine but many users have reported doing so successfully. If you are going to do this, we recommend installing the instances in different directories because NewsBin does not know how to share its configuration file and data files with itself. Also, each instance may download duplicates because they cannot share the same duplicate detection database. You can catch each one up on duplicate detection by running our SigGen utility. Run SigGen against all your binary directories and save the signature.dat file in one of your NewsBin directories. Then, copy the signature.dat file into the other NewsBin directory. This way, your two instances of NewsBin will not re-download files from previous runs. Also, make sure each instance is using a different configuration file. If you create shortcuts for them, make sure you start NewsBin with a config file as a command line parameter in the "Target" field of the shortcut. For example: "c:\program files\nbpro\nbpro.exe myconfig.nfg".
Prioritizing multiple servers: In the "Servers" window, you can click and drag your servers into the order you want. You should put your fastest server first, even if it does not have the best retention or completeness of posts. NewsBin will grab whatever it can from the first server and search the subsequent servers for additional headers or missing parts to multipart posts. Do not confuse this with the server setup screen accessable from the "Server" button on the toolbar. You want the window on the newsbin screen with two tabs labeled "Groups" and "Servers". The Servers tab is where you can re-order your servers.
The "First Time Records" setting (under the options screen) tells NewsBin how many records to pull from each newsgroup the first time it ever processes the group. Each subsequent time, NewsBin will download any new records that have been posted. For relatively small binary files, like pictures, a record equals a post. Setting "First Time Records" to 1000 in a picture group will yield about 1000 posts. The confusion comes when you hit the multimedia groups like MP3's and movies. There may be 30 or more separate posts that combine to make one complete binary file in these groups. Setting your "First Time Records" to 30,000 may be required to yield 1000 posts from the MP3 groups. To determine the best setting, download some headers from the group you are interested in and figure out the average number of parts per post. If you see lots of (1/1) in the subject field, these are not multi-part posts so your "First Time Records" should equal the number of posts you want to download the first time. If you see posts with (1/15) and (1/45) and everthing in between, figure an average of 30 times the number of posts you want to see.
We've had reports that the ASUS KT133 motherboard with the VIA Chipset may crash under high loads, we suspect because of the IDE. Apparently, upgrading the latest version of BIOS fixes this problem. A non-ASUS KT133 motherboard may also benefit from a bios upgrade. Also, make sure you have the latest VIA 4in1 drivers.
Version 4.0+ supports yEnc. The 3.x series and prior does not support yEnc because development on that series ended before yEnc became popular.