Usenet guide
Usenet is a place on the net where you share news and information in binary format. People take a file, a movie or mp3 for example, and then split the file with Winrar into manageable segments.
After that Quick par is used to create a recovery record of the file. This is then posted to news servers.
Some ISP's, offer newsgroups to there subscribers, these are often restricted in the amount of groups they cover, many allow only headers to be downloaded instead of the binary attachment, and nearly all have a poor retention rate.
This is when paid for public news-servers come into there own, they cover all the groups, have a longer retention period; often over forty five days, a very fast connection and many offer unlimited access.
NEWS SERVERS
With this in mind it is worth getting yourself a good news server: Newshosting is very good, also Giganews or you may want to try Easynews.
There are many more news hosts out there, these are just three that I have tried and found to be very good.
NEWS CLIENTS
Then you will need a news client or grabber, there are loads of these available, News rover, news bin and Grabit being some of the most popular. This will retrieve the file from the news server and join the attachments to make a usable file again. If you are a Mac user there is a very good client called Hogwasher
For now we will use Grabit, a free client that is very simple to use: you can get Grabit here:
BORING BIT !
next you will need to configure your news client , you will have been given a user name and password by your news host, along with the news server address when you signed up.
On installing grabit it will ask for your news server details: see tutorial on grabit site: here
now you should have grabit set up with you news server details and have downloaded a list of all available groups.
At this point you could search for individual groups in the alt.binaries section and subscribe to the groups you like the look of:
download the headers and manually browse for files. Highlighting your selection and then grabbing
It is important to get all the parts of the file, both rar and par files to ensure that the file you download has the maximum chance of being complete.
CHEAT :-o
You could go to Newzbin and sign up for premium membership, currently £2 for eight weeks. This applies to both Mac and windows users.
Here you can browse all the articles that have been posted to Usenet, when you see something you want you just click on the link and then a page will open showing all the files that make the item you want.
Click on the get message id's tab and download the .NZB file to your computer. Then go to the Batch screen in grabit and select import article from the centre of the tool bar and browse to the .NZB you have just downloaded, click on add, then grab.
Grabit will now collect all the files to get the post you want from all over Usenet and start downloading for you.
At this point its worth making sure you have a few simple tools on your computer to unpack the file once its down.
YOU NEED THIS
You will need Winrar and Quick Par for windows and Stuffit and MacPar OsX for Mac's.
WinRaR
Quick Par
Once Grabit has put the files in its download folder, use Quick Par by double clicking on the first Par2 file,( par files look like a stack of cd's)
this will then verify the contents of the file and give the option to repair if needed, then click on the first rar file and extract to a place on your hard drive. You may now have a CD/DVD image or .exe file, and often an Nfo file.
In Hogwasher you would follow the same basic steps of importing the .NZB files, and then verifying the par files and unpacking to get your finished image.
Nfo files are opened by right clicking and open with notepad, or a program like getdiz which is an Nfo reader. The Nfo contains important information about the file you have just downloaded.
It would also be helpful to have a full version of Nero 6 reloaded or Roxio easy media creator 7 on you system, and Alcohol 120% as many of the files that come down are in a image format and will be burnt to disc by one of these programs.
You may find it handy to have some form of ISO software, but this is not necessary at first. I use Ultra iso , but again there are many more out there, just Google for them and find one that suits you. Iso programs enable you to read the images, see, and manipulate the contents of the file you have just obtained.
If you use the divx and vcd groups to get a lot of films from, it would be a good idea to update the media codec's on you system, a good way to do this is a codec pack that will cover all formats. For Mac users you should get the latest Divx and Xvid codec's and it would be worth getting VLc player as this plays most movie formats. There may be other players out there that are better, please let me know and I will update as requiered.
This is buy no means a definitive guide to Usenet, its just a simple way to get you started, Happy Leeching ;-)
A very good site explaining the history of Usenet: here
And a useful site on the different file types that you may download: here