GrabIt - Adding servers and Usenet newsgroups

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We have now arrived at the point where we have to setup our newsserver.

Adding servers

In GrabIt’s main screen we see a field on the left with ‘My GrabIt’ and ‘Default Server’. To connect to our own newsserver, we have to change some settings. Right click on Default Server and select Server properties.

If the Default Server does not exist yet, simply right click My GrabIt and select Add server.

A screen called GrabIt – Server properties pops up and allows us to change the settings for our own newsserver.

Profile Name : Give your server a name. In the case of the default server, you will see that the only option is ‘Default Server’.
Hostname : In this field you have to enter your server address. This address may be provided by your Internet Service Provider or can be a payserver.
Port: Does not have to be changed. Port 119 is standard.
Account name & Password : If your server requires authentication, you may have to enter your username and password here. My server does not, so I leave them blank.
Server timeout after : If connecting to a server takes a long time, GrabIt will time out. (If auto retry items in batch from the previous chapter is checked, GrabIt will retry the failed files.)
Retries on errors : How many times GrabIt retries failed items.

Maximum allowed connections : The maximum number of simultaneous connections GrabIt can make with your server. This number may be different if you use a different server. If you get ‘too many connections’ errors, then decrease this value.

Adding extra servers:
Adding an extra server is very easy. Simply right click on My GrabIt located on the left and choose Add Server. Settings are changed in the same way as above.

Adding Usenet newsgroups

As we now have our servers set up , we can take a look at adding Usenet newsgroups to our group list. Below you can see the result of our previous actions.

As we can see, there are two servers we can use: my ISP’s server (default) and a payserver. In the following parts of the tutorial I will discuss only the default server.

First, we have to collect the grouplist from our newsserver. We can either right click on Default server and select Refresh grouplist or we can select our default server and click the big Refresh grouplist button. (remember that these buttons execute the most common actions).

If we look at our Batch tab, we can actually see GrabIt downloading our grouplist.

Once that’s done, we open the All groups on Default server tab. (Note that ‘Default server’ changes when selecting a different server). In this tab we see a long list of groups, but only a couple of them are of interest to us. These groups all begin with alt.binaries.*

Now it’s our task to pick some interesting groups. For this tutorial we are going to download a post from alt.binaries.boneless, so let’s add this group.

We already know which group we want, so we can fill in the search filter (1).
Subscribing to a Usenet newsgroup can be done in two ways: either right click on the group and select Subscribe (2a), or select the Usenet newsgroup and click the Subscribe button (2b).

Right now we can see how many articles (parts of posts) the group contains. This will be of interest when updating a group.

Now we have subscribed to alt.binaries.boneless, it is also shown on the left of the main screen, under our Default server. (Note: you have to add each group for each server manually)

To the next chapter: Downloading headers and files

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