Tag Archives: Newsgroups

Linux Tools

Pan: A Useful NewsReader for Linux

6 Comments

Introduction

PAN is a newsreader that has been around for ages. It allows you to sift through the massive clutter that Usenet has become through its really fast interface loaded with tons of features!

It’s development died off way back in 2012, but recently it’s development has picked right back up again. Not only is this product feature rich and open source, but it’s written purely in C++ which makes it incredibly light weight (thus very, very fast). Some of the subtle product enhancements this product has seen in the past few months make it worthy to be in the spot light again.

So What Can It Do?

  • Header Caching: Tell it the group(s) you want and how much of it you want to see and it will download the headers it retrieves to a local cache file. This is awesome because now you can sift through this content offline.
    Cache Headers
    Cache Headers
  • Header Scoring: You can flag key aspects of articles with a score. By default every header retrieved has a score of zero (0) unless you start dabbling in this area.

    Anything that scores less than (or equal to) -9999 can be configured to not list itself at all. Some well set scores can greatly clean up your ability to locate content in groups.

    You can score content higher and/or lower based on the posts author, subject, size, age, etc. You can even apply scoring through regular expressions too!

    Scoring is very powerful when used properly! I’ll talk about it again a bit later in this blog once you’ve gotten set up. But if we were to apply scoring to the previous screenshot (above), it might look like this (all garbage cleaned up and content prioritized with color coding too):

    Header Scoring
    Header Scoring
  • Multiple Server Support: Got a block account? No problem, you can add it as a secondary server and only pull from it if the Primary one is unavailable.
  • NZB-File Support: The treasure maps of Usenet can be loaded into Pan too and downloaded through it. True automation of these come through systems like NZBGet and SABnzbd, but it’s still worth knowing that not only is this a newsreader, but it can pass as a downloader as well!
  • Concurrent Connections: Like any great browser/downloader of any system; files are retrieve concurrently. This means that you can just keep browsing and tagging content of interest seamlessly without interruptions.
  • Header Compression Support: One of the new enhancements surfaced with the new development of this project. This makes a world of difference when retrieving hundreds of thousands of headers from a Usenet group. Enabling this feature along (if your Usenet provider supports it) will greatly reduce wait times!

Pan’s Disabled Features

The features page on PANs website explains about a parent company (called ChimPanXi) that tries to sell this free product with added functionality. I guess the deal they have with the developers is to just disable a few features so that they can be re-enabled them the paid version (purely speculation)?

But since the (Pan) code is open source, the options are right there in front of us but just disabled. Quite honestly… of all this disabled functionality, only one is truly worth pointing out: Pan restricts you to just 4 allowable concurrent connections to your Usenet provider at a time. Here is a small patch I created which increases this number to 99. The build I provide in this blog already has this patch applied. Here are the rest of the missing features (with some of my comments as well); maybe some might see value in the others?

Pans Missing Features
Pans Missing Features

The Goods

For those hooked up to my repository are already set, just type the following:

# install the new version of Pan
yum install pan --enablerepo=nuxref

You can also reference this table too for direct links:

Package Download Description
pan el7.rpm, fc22.rpm, fc23.rpm, fc24.rpm, fc25.rpm The Newsreader: This is the program that this blog focuses on.

Note: The source rpm can be obtained here which builds everything you see in the table above. It’s not required for the application to run, but might be useful for developers or those who want to inspect how I put the package together.

It’s also worth noting (again) that this build includes a small patch to increase the maximum allowable number of concurrent connections from 4 to 99.

Securing Your Connection

There is very little security built into Pan from a connection point of view. What little security is (normally) in place is built using GnuTLS. GnuTLS has a history of not keeping up with the security exploits and vulnerabilities that surface with encryption libraries. It doesn’t make it unsafe; it just doesn’t make it as reliable as it’s competition (OpenSSL and Crypto). For this reason the packages I provide are intentionally not built against it (GnuTLS).

It’s really not a problem at the end of the day because there are other ways of securing this connection (properly). The way I use (and recommend) is through Stunnel.

Stunnel allows you to take an unencrypted input (from Pan) and connect it to a secure connected one (at your Usenet provider). The best thing about stunnel is that it links to your (OpenSSL) shared system libraries libssl.so and libcrypto.so which are actively maintained and patched! Basically what I’m saying is by attaching Pan to Stunnel: you get the feature rich usage of Pan and the ongoing (reliable) security of OpenSSL.

The following will get you set up with stunnel; you’ll want to be root before running the command below:

# Install stunnel (if it's not installed already)
# you'll need to be connected to either EPEL or NuxRef for this
# to work:
yum install stunnel

You can also reference this table too for direct links:

Package Download Description
stunnel el7.rpm, fc22.rpm, fc23.rpm, fc24.rpm, fc25.rpm Secure Tunnel: for data encryption.

Note: This RPM is not required by PAN to run correctly. It does however offer you a safer and more secure method of encrypting your communication to (and from) your NNTP Server.		 
# You must have root permissions when setting up
# stunnel

# Create relay bound to local server only (semi-colons are for
# comments):
cat << _EOF > /etc/stunnel/stunnel.conf
; Use it for client mode
; This is the pass through mode you need to encrypted
; your NNTP traffic:
client = yes
 
[nntp]
;
; --- IN ---
;
; local port to listen on (on this PC)
; You will configure PAN to connect here:
accept = 127.0.0.1:119

;
; --- OUT ---
;
; The Remote Usenet Server's (encrypted) connection to use:
; In this example, I'm just pointing to Astraweb, but you
; can provide any Usenet server you wish here. Just be sure
; to point it to their secure transport point!
connect = ssl.astraweb.com:563
_EOF

# This line below is useless, but it allows you revisit this blog
# entry and continue and copy and paste these instructions at a later
# time. The line removes any previous entries set to prevent the
# creation of duplicate entries  in your startup file at another time
# It's harmless to run at any point:
sed -i -e '/bin\/stunnel/d' /etc/rc.d/rc.local

# Configure stunnel to start after each boot
echo "# Start /usr/bin/stunnel on boot each time:" >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local
echo "/usr/bin/stunnel" >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local

# By default stunnel is configured to read 
# it's configuration from /etc/stunnel/stunnel.conf
# on startup:
stunnel

The next step is to update your PAN server configuration to point to your local server (localhost or 127.0.0.1) instead of the remote one you’re accessing. Make sure to set the port to 119 too like so:

Stunnel Pan Configuration
Stunnel Pan Configuration

You’ll provide the same username and password you would have otherwise provided to your Usenet provider.

The end result is a secure connection between you and your Usenet provider like so:
Pan Setup With Stunnel

Scoring

Scoring articles can greatly ease your life when looking through all of the headers in front of you; it’s great for:

  • Eliminating SPAM
  • Filtering out potential malicious content (such as Trojans and Viruses)
  • Increasing the visibility of items of interest
  • Locating Authors of interest with ease

All scores can be optionally associated with a time limit too. When the limit expires, so does the score. This is useful when you only want to temporarily filter content. Otherwise the permanent scores will make up most of your configuration. To add a score, simply click Articles > Add a Scoring Rule…

Add Scoring Rule
Add a Scoring Rule

Here is an example of a rule you might add; this one greatly reduces the score of all entries that have potentially dangerous file extensions in the subject line:

Block Potentially Malicious Content
Block Potentially Malicious Content

Pan’s built in filter field allows you to sift through all of the articles you found with keywords. Pairing this functionality with the scoring one really shows off the power of Pan.

All created scores are kept in ~/.pan2/Scores so don’t worry if you mess one up. You can just as easily open this file and fix it. Any manual changes to this file will however require you to exit out of Pan (if it’s open) and restart it.

Here is just a few entries of what you might have in your Score file:

%BOS
% Greatly reduce score of potentially malicious content
[alt.bin*]
Score:: -9999
Subject: .*\.(exe|bat|vbs|cpl|msi|scr|vb(script)?|ws(f|h))[^A-Za-z0-9].*
%EOS

%BOS
% Moderately increase the score of compressed content
[alt.bin*]
Score:: 2500
Subject: .*\.(z(ip|[0-9]{2})|r(ar|[0-9]{2})|7z|iso)[^A-Za-z0-9]([0-9]{3}[^A-Za-z0-9])?.*
%EOS

%BOS
% Very slightly decrease the content of PAR content
% This allows it to not quite have the same spot light as
% the item it matches up against. If it were a compressed file
% it would already have +2500 from the previous score entry
% identified above.  These will just sit at +2400 instead.
[alt.bin*]
Score:: -100
Subject: .*(\.vol[0-9]+\+[0-9]+)?\.(par2|sfv)[^A-Za-z0-9].*
%EOS

%BOS
% Very slightly increase the score of NZB-Files
[alt.bin*]
Score:: 250
Subject: .*\.(nzb)[^A-Za-z0-9].*
%EOS 

%BOS
% Mildly drop the score of cross-posted content
[alt.bin*]
Score:: -750
Xref: (.*:){2} % cross-posted to 2 or more groups 
%EOS

Wrapping It Up

I’m certainly not asking anyone to change from their existing system if it works for them. What I am pointing out though is that Pan is completely free, it’s open source and the features it offers are comparable (if not better) than all of it’s competition. Although it works great on Linux, it also works on many other platforms as well such as Microsoft and Apple.

It might not have a beautiful interface, but it wasn’t built to fill your systems memory with bloated eye candy. It was built to be fast and effective… and truly, it really is.

The newer versions coming out are really great! If you haven’t given it a try since it’s dated ones, you really should! If you’re interested in seeing how Usenet is structured, than this is also a great tool to learn with. If you run an indexer (such as newznab or the many forks of it) you can practice your regular expressions (regexs) using Pan. For an Indexer Admin, this tool is especially great in debugging your regexs!

Credit

This blog took me a very long time to put together and test! The repository hosting alone accommodates all my blog entries up to this date. All of the custom packaging described here was done by me personally. I took the open source available to me and rebuilt it to make it an easier solution and decided to share it. If you like what you see and wish to copy and paste this HOWTO, please reference back to this blog post at the very least. It’s really all I ask.

Sources

Missing Linux Packages

A Usenet Solution For CentOS 6

33 Comments

What Is Usenet

In a nutshell; it’s basically a bunch of (file) servers that host a ton of information people place onto it. We’re talking about petabytes (1000+ Terabytes) of information. There is very little organization, but it does have a defined structure.

Content is sorted into groups which act as containers for it to be stored and retrieved from. You can think of a group like you might think of a directory on your computer at home. We create directories all the time in efforts to add order and structure to where we keep things (so we can find them later). The thing is, Usenet has no moderation; so you can place content in any group you want. As a result; it’s a lot like what you might expect someone’s hard drive would look like if you gave 5 million people access to it. Basically there is just a ton of crap everywhere.

The World Wide Web is similar to this, but instead of groups, we sort things by URLs (web addresses) such as http://nuxref.com. Google uses it’s own web crawlers to scan the entire World Wide Web just to create an index from it. Each website they find, they track it’s name, it’s content, and the language it’s written in. The result from them doing this is: we get to use their fantastic search engine! A search engine that has made our lives incredibly easy by granting us fast and easy accessible information at our fingertips.

The Usenet Indexer

Usenet is a very big world of it’s own and it’s a lot harder to get around in (but not impossible) without anything indexing it. Thankfully Usenet is no where near the size of the World Wide Web which makes indexing it is very possible for a much larger audience! In fact, we can even index it with our personal computer(s) we run at home. By indexing it; we can easily search it for content we’re interested in (much like how we use Google for web page searching).

Since just about anyone can index Usenet, one has to think: Why index Usenet ourselves if someone’s already doing it for us elsewhere? In fact, there are many sites (and tools) that have already done all the indexing (some better than others) of Usenet who are willing to share it with others (us). But it’s important to know: it can take a lot of server power, disk space, and network consumption for these site administrators to constantly index Usenet for us. Since most (if not all) of the sites are just hobbyists doing it for fun, it gets expensive for them to maintain things. For that reason some of them may charge or ask for a donation. If you want to use their services, you should respect their measly request of $8USD to $20USD for a lifetime membership. But don’t get discouraged, there are still a lot of free ones too!

Just keep in mind that Usenet is constantly getting larger; people are constantly posting new content to it every second. You’ll find that the sites that charge a fee are already (relatively) aware of the new changes to Usenet every time you search with it. Others (the free ones) may only update their index a few times a day or so.

Alternatively (the free route), we can go as far as running our own Usenet indexer (such as NewzNab) just as the hobbyists did (mentioned above). NewzNab will index Usenet on a regular basis. With your own indexer, you can choose to just index content that appeals to you. You can even choose to offer your services publicly if you want. Just keep in mind that Usenet is huge! If you do decide to go this route, you’ll find it a very CPU and network intensive operation. You may want to make sure you don’t exceed your Internet Service Providers (ISP) download limits.

Now back to the Google analogy I started earlier: When you find a link on Google you like, you simply click on it and your browser redirect you to the website you chose; end of story. However, in the Usenet Indexing world, once you find something of interest, the Usenet Indexer will provide you with an NZB File. An NZB file is effectively a map that identifies where your content can be specifically located on Usenet (but not the data itself). An NZB file to Usenet is similar to what a Torrent file is to a BitTorrent Client. Both NZB and Torrent files provide the blueprints needed to mine (acquire) your data. Both NZB and Torrent files require a Downloader to preform the actual data mining for you.

The Downloader

The Downloader can take an NZB File it’s provided and then uses it to acquire the actual data it maps to. This is the final piece of the puzzle!
Of the list below, you really only need to choose 1 Downloader. I just listed more then 1 to give you alternatives to work with. My personal preference is NZBGet because it is more flexible. But it’s flexibility can also be very confusing (only at first). Once you get over it’s learning curve and especially the initial configuration; it’s a dream to work with. Alternatively SABnzbd may be better for the novice if your just starting off with Usenet and don’t want to much more of a learning curve then you already have.

Either way, pick you poison:

Title Package Details
NZBGet rpm/src NZBGet is written in C++ and designed with performance in mind to achieve maximum download speed by using very little system resources.
Community / Manual
**Note: I created this patch in a recent update rebuild (Jul 17th, 2014) to fix a few directory paths so the compression tools (unrar and 7zip) can work right away. I also added these compression tools as dependencies to the package so they’ll just be present for you at the start.
**Note: I also created this patch in a recent update rebuild (Nov 9th, 2014) to allow the RC Script to take optional configuration defined in /etc/sysconfig/nzbget.

You can install NZBGet using the steps below:

# Note: You must link to the NuxRef repository for this to work!
#      See: http://nuxref.com/nuxref-repository/

# Install NZBGet
yum install -y nzbget 
    --enablerepo=nuxref 
    --enablerepo=nuxref-shared

# Grab Template
cp /usr/share/nzbget/nzbget.conf ~/.nzbget

# Protect it
chmod 600 ~/.nzbget

# Start it Up (as a non-root user):
nzbget -D

# You should now be able to access it via: 
#     http://localhost:6789/
SABnzbd n/a SABnzbd is an Open Source Binary Newsreader written in Python.
Community / Manual
Note:I have not packaged this yet, but will probably eventually get around to it. For now it can be accessed from it’s repository on GitHub, or you can quickly set it up in your environment as follows:

# There is no RPM installer for this one, we just
# fetch straight from their repository.
# Install git (if it's not already)
yum install -y git

# Grab a snapshot of SABnzbd
git clone https://github.com/sabnzbd/sabnzbd.git SABnzbd

# Start it Up (as a non-root user):
python SABnzbd/SABnzbd.py 
    --daemon 
    --pid $(pwd)/SABnzbd/sabnzbd.pid

# You should now be able to access it via: 
#     http://localhost:8080/

Automated Index Searchers

These tools search for already indexed content you’re interested in and can be configured to automatically download it for you when it’s found. It itself doesn’t do the downloading, but it will automate the connection between your chosen Indexer and Downloader (such as NZBGet or SABnzbd). For this reason, these tools do not actually search Usenet at all and therefore have very little overhead on your system (or NAS drive).

Title Package Details
Sonarr
nzbdrone-icon		 rpm/src Automatic TV Show downloader
Formally known as NZBDrone; it has since been changed to Sonarr. This was only made possible because of the blog I wrote on mono v3.x .

# Note: You must link to the NuxRef repository for this to work!
#      See: http://nuxref.com/nuxref-repository/

# Installation of this plugin:
yum install -y sonarr 
    --enablerepo=nuxref 
    --enablerepo=nuxref-shared 

# Start it Up (as a non-root user):
nohup mono /opt/NzbDrone/NzbDrone.exe &

# You should now be able to access it via: 
#     http://localhost:8989/
Sick Beard
sickbeard-icon		 n/a (Another) Automatic TV Show downloader

Note:I have not packaged this yet, but will probably eventually get around to it. For now it can be accessed from it’s repository on GitHub, or you can quickly set it up in your environment as follows:

# Install git (if it's not already)
yum install -y git

# Grab a snapshot of Sick Beard
# Note that we grab the master branch, otherwise we default
# to the development one.
git clone -b master https://github.com/midgetspy/Sick-Beard.git SickBeard

# Start it Up (as a non-root user):
python SickBeard/SickBeard.py 
   --daemon 
   --pidfile $(pwd)/SickBeard/sickbeard.pid

# You should now be able to access it via: 
#     http://localhost:8081/
CouchPotato
couchpotato-icon		 n/a Automatic movie downloader

Note:I have not packaged this yet, but will probably eventually get around to it. For now it can be accessed from it’s repository on GitHub, or you can quickly set it up in your environment as follows:

# Install git (if it's not already)
yum install -y git

# Grab a snapshot of CouchPotato
git clone https://github.com/RuudBurger/CouchPotatoServer.git CouchPotato

# Start it Up (as a non-root user):
python CouchPotato/CouchPotato.py 
   --daemon 
   --pid_file CouchPotato/couchpotato.pid

# You should now be able to access it via: 
#     http://localhost:5050/
Headphones
headphones-icon		 n/a Automatic music downloader

Note:I have not packaged this yet, but will probably eventually get around to it. For now it can be accessed from it’s repository on GitHub, or you can quickly set it up in your environment as follows:

# Install git (if it's not already)
yum install -y git

# Grab a snapshot of Headphones
git clone https://github.com/rembo10/headphones Headphones

# Start it Up (as a non-root user):
python Headphones/Headphones.py 
   --daemon 
   --pidfile $(pwd)/Headphones/headphones.pid

# You should now be able to access it via: 
#     http://localhost:8181/
Mylar
mylar-icon		 n/a Automatic Comic Book downloader

Note:I have not packaged this yet, but will probably eventually get around to it. For now it can be accessed from it’s repository on GitHub, or you can quickly set it up in your environment as follows:

# Install git (if it's not already)
yum install -y git

# Grab a snapshot of Headphones
git clone https://github.com/evilhero/mylar Mylar

# Start it Up (as a non-root user):
python Mylar/Mylar.py 
   --daemon 
   --pidfile $(pwd)/Mylar/Mylar.pid

# You should now be able to access it via: 
#     http://localhost:8090/

NZBGet Processing Scripts

For those who prefer SABnzbd, you can ignore this part of the blog. For those using NZBGet, one of it’s strongest features is it’s ability to process content it downloads before and after it’s received. The Post Processing (PP) has been specifically one of NZBGet’s greatest features. It allows separation between the the function NZBGet (which is to download content in NZB files) and what you want to do with the content afterwards. Post Processing could do anything such as catalogue what was received and place it into an SQL database. Post Processing could rename the content and sort it for you in separate directories depending on what it is. Post processing can be as simple as just emailing you when the download completed or post on Facebook or Twitter. You’re not limited to just 1 PP Script either, you can chain them and run a whole slew of them one after another. The options are endless.

I’ve taken some of the popular PP Scripts from the NZBGet forum and packaged them in a self installing RPM as well to make life easy for those who want it. Some of these packages require many dependencies and ports to make the installation smooth. Although i link directly to the RPMs here, you are strongly advised to link to my repository with yum if you haven’t already done so.

Title Package Provides Details
Failure Link rpm/src FAILURELINK If download fails, the script sends info about the failure to indexer site, so a replacement NZB (same movie or TV episode) can be queued up if available. The indexer site must support DNZB-Header “X-DNZB-FailureLink”.

Note: The integration works only for downloads queued via URL (including RSS). NZB-files queued from local disk don’t have enough information to contact the indexer site.

# Note: You must link to the NuxRef repository for this to work!
#      See: http://nuxref.com/repo/

# Installation of this plugin:
yum install -y nzbget-script-failurelink 
    --enablerepo=nuxref 
    --enablerepo=nuxref-shared
nzbToMedia rpm/src DELETESAMPLES
RESETDATETIME
NZBTOCOUCHPOTATO
NZBTOGAMEZ
NZBTOHEADPHONES
NZBTOMEDIA
NZBTOMYLAR
NZBTONZBDRONE
NZBTOSICKBEARD		 Provides an efficient way to handle post processing for
CouchPotatoServer, SickBeard, Sonarr, Headphones, and Mylar
when using NZBGet on low performance systems like a NAS.

# Note: You must link to the NuxRef repository for this to work!
#      See: http://nuxref.com/repo/

# Installation of this plugin:
yum install -y nzbget-script-nzbtomedia 
    --enablerepo=nuxref 
    --enablerepo=nuxref-shared

Note: This package includes the removal of the entire PYPKG/libs directory. I replaced all of the dependencies previously defined here with global ones used by CentOS. The reason for this was due to the fact a lot of other packages all share the same libraries. It just didn’t make sense to maintain a duplicate of it all.

Subliminal rpm/src SUBLIMINAL Provides a wrapper that can be integrated with NZBGet with subliminal (which fetches subtitles given a filename or filepath). Subliminal uses the correct video hashes using the powerful guessit library to ensure you have the best matching subtitles. It also relies on enzyme to detect embedded subtitles and avoid retrieving duplicates.

Multiple subtitles services are available using:opensubtitles, tvsubtitles, podnapisi, addic7ed, and thesubdb.

# Note: You must link to the NuxRef repository for this to work!
#      See: http://nuxref.com/repo/

# Installation of this plugin:
yum install -y nzbget-script-subliminal 
    --enablerepo=nuxref 
    --enablerepo=nuxref-shared

*Note: python-subliminal (what this PP Script is a wrapper too) had some issues I had to address. For one, I eliminated the entire PYPKG/subliminal/libs directory. I replaced all of the dependencies previously defined here with global ones used by CentOS. The reason for this was due to the fact a lot of other packages all share the same libraries. It just didn’t make sense to maintain a duplicate of it all.
**Note: Subliminal was written using Dict Comprehensions (PEP 274), a feature that wasn’t introduced until Python 2.7. Unfortunately, the developers of it had no interest in resolving this and closed the issue with ‘Upgrade to Python 2.7 or Python v3.3. For this reason, subliminal does ‘not’ work at all with CentOS or Red Hat 6.x. So… I fixed that. Now, I can proudly tell you that the copy of subliminal I host on my repository is 100% compatibility with python 2.6 (this includes a few Logging backported functionality too).

I am the current maintainer of this plugin and it can be accessed from my GitHub page here.

DirWatch rpm/src DIRWATACH DirWatch can watch multiple directories for NZB-Files and move them for processing by NZBGet. This tool is awesome if you have a DropBox account or a network share you want NZBGet to scan! Without this script NZBGet can only be configured to scan one (and only one) directory for NZB-Files.

# Note: You must link to the NuxRef repository for this to work!
#      See: http://nuxref.com/repo/

# Installation of this plugin:
yum install -y nzbget-script-dirwatch 
    --enablerepo=nuxref 
    --enablerepo=nuxref-shared

I am the current maintainer of this plugin and it can be accessed from my GitHub page here.

TidyIt rpm/src TIDYIT TidyIt integrates itself with NZBGet’s scheduling and is used
to preform basic house cleaning on a media library. TidyIt
removes orphaned meta information, empty directories and unused
content. It’s the perfect OCD tool for those who want to eliminate
any unnecessary bloat on their filesystem and media library.

# Note: You must link to the NuxRef repository for this to work!
#      See: http://nuxref.com/repo/

# Installation of this plugin:
yum install -y nzbget-script-tidyit 
    --enablerepo=nuxref 
    --enablerepo=nuxref-shared

I am the current maintainer of this plugin and it can be accessed from my GitHub page here.

Notify rpm/src NOTIFY Notify provides a wrapper that can be integrated with NZBGet allowing you to notify in just about any supported method today such as
email, KODI (XBMC), Prowl, Growl, PushBullet, NotifyMyAndroid, Toasty, Pushalot,
Boxcar, Faast, Telegram, Join, and Slack Notifications. It also supports pushing information in HTTP Post request
via JSON or XML (SOAP structure).

The script can also be used as a standalone tool and called from the
command line allowing it to support a lot more tools besides NZBGet.

# Note: You must link to the NuxRef repository for this to work!
#      See: http://nuxref.com/repo/

# Installation of this plugin:
yum install -y nzbget-script-notify 
    --enablerepo=nuxref 
    --enablerepo=nuxref-shared

I am the current maintainer of this plugin and it can be accessed from my GitHub page here.

Password Detector rpm/src PASSWORDETECTOR Password Detector is a queue script that checks for passwords inside of every .rar file of a NZB downloaded. This means that it can detect password protected NZB’s very early before downloading is complete, allowing the NZB to be automatically deleted or paused. Detecting early saves data, time, resources, etc.

# Note: You must link to the NuxRef repository for this to work!
#      See: http://nuxref.com/repo/

# Installation of this plugin:
yum install -y nzbget-script-passworddetector 
    --enablerepo=nuxref 
    --enablerepo=nuxref-shared
Fake Detector rpm/src FAKEDETECTOR This is a queue-script which is executed during download, after every downloaded file containing in nzb-file (typically a rar-file). The script lists content of download rar-files and tries to detect fake nzbs. Thus it saves your bandwidth if it detects that the content your downloading if the contents within it fail to pass a series of validity checks.

# Note: You must link to the NuxRef repository for this to work!
#      See: http://nuxref.com/repo/

# Installation of this plugin:
yum install -y nzbget-script-fakedetector 
    --enablerepo=nuxref 
    --enablerepo=nuxref-shared
Video Sort rpm/src VIDEOSORT With post-processing script VideoSort you can automatically organize downloaded video files.

# Note: You must link to the NuxRef repository for this to work!
#      See: http://nuxref.com/repo/

# Installation of this plugin:
yum install -y nzbget-script-videosort 
    --enablerepo=nuxref 
    --enablerepo=nuxref-shared

Note: This package includes the removal of the entire PYPKG/libs directory. I replaced all of the dependencies previously defined here with global ones used by CentOS. The reason for this was due to the fact a lot of other packages all share the same libraries. It just didn’t make sense to maintain a duplicate of it all.

Mobile Integration

nzb360-logoThere are some fantastic Apps out there that allow you to integrate your phone with the applications mentioned above. It can allow you to manage your downloads from wherever you are. A special shout out to NZB 360 who recently had his app pulled from the Google Play Store for no apparent reason and had to set up shop outside. I can say first hand that his application is amazing! You should totally consider it if you have an Android phone.

Usenet Provides

For those who don’t have Usenet already, it does come at an extra cost and/or fee. The cost averages anywhere between $6 to $20 USD/month (anything more and you’re paying to much). The reason for this is because Usenet is a completely isolated network from the Internet. It’s comprised of a completely isolated set of interconnected servers. While the internet is comprised of hundreds of millions of servers all hosting specific content, each Usenet server hosts the entire usenet database… it hosts everything. If anything is uploaded to Usenet, all of the interconnected servers update themselves with their own local copy of it (to serve us). For this to happen, their servers have to have petabytes of storage. The fee they charge you is just going to support their operational cost such as bandwidth, maintenance and the regular addition of storage to their infrastructure. There is very little profit to be made for them at $8 a person. Here is a breakdown of a few servers (in alphabetical order) I’m aware of and support:

Provider Server
Location(s)		 Notes Average Cost
Astraweb US & Europe Retention: 2158 Days (5.9 Years) $6.66USD/Month to $15USD/Month
see here for details
Usenet Server US Retention: 2159 Days (5.9 Years)
Has a free 14 day trial		 $13.33USD/Month to $14.95USD/Month
see here for details

*Note: Table information was last updated on Jul 14th, 2014. Prices are subject to change as time goes on and this blog post isn’t updated.
**Note: If you have a provider that you would like to be added to this list… Or if you simply spot an error in pricing or linking, please feel free to contact me so I can update it right away.

Why do people use Usenet/Newsgroups?

  • Speed: It’s literally just you and another server; a simple 1 to 1 connection. Data transfer speeds will always be as fast as your ISP can carry your traffic to and from the Usenet Server you signed up with. Unlike torrents, content isn’t governed by how many seeders and leechers that have the content available to you. You never have to deal with upload/download ratios, maintain quotas, and or sit idle in someone’s queue who will serve data to you eventually.
  • Security: You only deal with secure connections between you and your Usenet Provider; no one else! Torrents can have you to maintaining thousands of connections to different systems and sharing data with them. With BitTorrent setups, tracker are publicly advertising what you have to share and what your trying to download. Your privacy is public to anyone using the same tracker that you’re connected to. Not only that, but most torrent connections are insecure as well which allows virtually anyone to view what you’re doing.

Please know that I am not against torrents at all! In fact, now I’ll take the time to mention a few points where torrents are excel over Usenet:

  • Cost: It doesn’t usually cost you anything to use the torrent network. It all depends on the tracker your using of course (some private trackers charge for their usage). But if you’re just out to get the free public stuff made available to us, there are absolutely no costs at all to use this method!
  • Availability: Usenet is far from perfect. When someone uploads something onto their Usenet Provider, by the time it propagates this new content to all of the other Usenet Servers, there is a small chance the data will be corrupted. This happens with Usenet all of the time. To compensate for this, Usenet users anticipate corruption (sad but true). These people kindly post Parchive files to Usenet to compliment whatever they previously uploaded. Parchive files work similar to how RAID works; they provide building blocks to reassemble data in the event it’s corrupted. Corruption never happens with Torrents unless the person hosting decides to host corrupted data. Any other scenario would simply be because your BitTorrent Client had a bug in it.
  • Retention: As long as someone is willing to seed something, or enough combined leechers can reconstruct what is being shared, then data will always stay alive in the BitTorrent world. However with Usenet, the Usenet Server is hosting EVERYTHING which means it has to maintain a lot data on a lot of disk space! For this reason, a retention period is inevitably met. A time is eventually reached where the Usenet Server purges (erases) older content from these hard disks to make room for the new stuff showing up every day.

Honestly, at the end of the day: both Torrents and Usenet Servers have their pros and cons. We will always continue each weigh them at different levels. What’s considered the right choice for one person, might not be the right one for another. Heck, just use both depending on your situation! 🙂

Source