Tag: usenet

I’ve been uploading stacks of files to Usenet over on AusGamers lately to try and make it easier for gamers to get them, doing it all on Linux using newspost. I’ve been struggling with an issue for a few months – an error which stops a posting session in its tracks.

WARNING: unexpected server response: 240 post
WARNING: unexpected server response: 240 post
Socket error: Broken pipe

Fortunately newspost is awesome and with some careful checking I’ve been able to resume broken uploads by manually posting parts of files, but uploading large files (like the 10gb LOTRO client I uploaded over the weekend) is a total pain in the ass, as it means I’m constantly spending time restarting it (and it’s not uploading).

Well, I finally decided to try and fix it, but Googled the error first, and of course someone already had. Debian have a patch available which fixes this error. The official newspost site hasn’t been updated since 2003, so if you’re like me and just want a source tarball, I’ve patched the original source with it and made it available right here.

The Giganews Accelerator is a free Windows application distributed by Usenet provider Giganews to provide compressed, encrypted header downloads. It also provides in-built speed control and some statistics about connections.

I recently used it to download the full list of headers from alt.binaries.games (I accidentally blew away all the AusGamers NZBs from our file server and needed to recreate them), which worked out to be around 9gb of data (once stuffed into a MySQL database).

My header retrieval script estimated it was going to take about 30 hours from start to finish. I recalled something about compressed headers and did some Googling and found this, and then tried it out – the new estimate was less than 10 hours, and I think it actually finished faster than that (I left it running overnight and it was done by the time I got up).

There’s a couple of annoying things about it:

1) There’s only a Windows version. A Linux version would have saved me heaps of dicking around (my header stuff usually runs on Linux on an AusGamers server, so I had to move the whole thing onto my work box and Windowsify it all).

2) The Windows version will only listen on localhost. There’s no way to make it listen on all IPs for a box, so you can’t (for example) run it on a Windows box and connect to it from some other box (which would have obviated the need for number 1, at least for me in this particular scenario, as I have a Windows server I could have used).

I tried a few things I found – notably, netsh for Windows, which looks really handy but deserves another post all on its own, if only for the fact that it’s advertised purpose doesn’t seem to actually work on Windows XP because of some bug.

Overall though, if you’re doing anything on Usenet that involves getting a lot of headers, getting this thing working is pretty handy.