Extreme newbie-got q's on grabbing off newsgroups

[MattB_99_30thTA]

Ok, if I could jsut figure out how to get the files off of alt.binaries.vcd or whatever, I would be ok. Using ForteAgent full to get to the newsgroups through my server. I see a lot of posts of movies, but the agent tells me the message has incomplete file pieces. They seem to be rather scattered. How and where do I find either all parts in one post, or all of the parts in corresponding messages and get them downloaded to my machine?? That's my folly, I can't seem to figure it out as ForteAgent tells me to "join files" to get the message, then it aborts. I can't select the file for retrieval either.

As well-do I use winrar to extract the pieces and put them together? Any FAQ on doing this?

I can burn no problem with Nero.

Thanks for any help.

Matt
`99 30th Anniversary Trans Am

[Teleri]

Well it depends on your news server partly. alot of providers censor certain groups cause a lot of less then legal files are on them. or some have bad retenion times. try to do retrive all headers in the newsgroup or delete the inc parts and try to retreave all headers again. if that does not work ask for fills

btw if you have a computer running linux try to grab articles with a linux newsreader named pan it is very forte agent like and has a lot of nice features

[neo----01]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-07-18 10:41:57, Teleri wrote:
Well it depends on your news server partly. alot of providers censor certain groups cause a lot of less then legal files are on them. or some have bad retenion times. try to do retrive all headers in the newsgroup or delete the inc parts and try to retreave all headers again. if that does not work ask for fills

btw if you have a computer running linux try to grab articles with a linux newsreader named pan it is very forte agent like and has a lot of nice features
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

neo____
If you are using windows you want a program called newsgrabber. ver 3 + u want
it does everything youve asked about and much more.you can even filter out uncompleted upload which is great!!
its easy with newsgrabber, give it a try

[El_Mero_Zooter]

its probably your isp and how people post to them. @Hommies have lists going around with a list of all the news servers available all over the states and canada.
Usually you gotta find a good server with good retention. Some folks could start posting early morning and say by the time one gets home after five , you'd have missed the first 3 or 4 files (filename.rar, filename.r01 etc...).
If you cant find any of your posts or files that you need, you;d have to do like Teleri said and ask for repost on the repost sub group, e.g. alt.binaries.vcd.reposts ....and most folkz will do you fillz and you could/should contribute others fillz if you got the filez.

OR
subscribe to a premium news carrier like
giganews.com, easynews.com,
or search google for free usenet..
http://www.faqs.org/usenet/

ZtR

[dumwaldo]

greetings,

getting started on usenet can seem tricky but it is actually quite simple. im gonna cheat and just post something i wrote in the past but it should answer your questions...

HOW DO I DOWNLOAD LARGE FILES FROM USENET?
first i think it is important that you understand how the files are "broken up" before you try to download one. with a file that is multiple hundreds of megs it is nescessary to break it into managable parts. in 99% of the cases this is done using winrar, the other 1% it is winace. for those of you not familiar with winrar it is a compression archiver like zip however it is able to take large files and create "volumes" from it. in short it takes a 500 meg file and makes 50 individual 10 meg files from it. in order to "extract" the single avi file you must have ALL of the parts and winrar installed in your machine.

there is still another level of fragmenting the files and that is where it gets tricky. when a post of a large file is made on usenet the newsreader (a client for viewing, retrieving and posting messages to and from usenet) will break the message into smaller parts in the same manner that winrar did. the easiest way to reassemble the messages is to use a newsreader to retrieve them. Forte agent is a very popular client that can be aquired in a free shareware version from any popular download site. the free version does not automate certain steps that the full version will do automatically. i will try to illustrate that here....

in free agent a message will appear like this:
(waldo rips)test movie.rar(1/20)
(waldo rips)test movie.rar(2/20)
(waldo rips)test movie.rar(3/20)
(waldo rips)test movie.rar(4/20)...and so on right down to (20/20)
so what that is saying is that this paticular part was broken into 20 parts by the news reader that posted it. in order to retrieve it you must take all 20 seperate messages and "join" them. agent can easily join them by selecting the appropriate parts and simply clicking the join button. the full registered version of agent will in most cases eliminate the need to do this. using full agent messages will be automatically rejoined and displayed in one header that reads...
(waldo rips)test movie.rar(*/20)
in that case you do not need to join anything the newsreader has already performed the action of joining the message parts for you. an idel posting will look like this...
(waldo rips)test movie.rar(*/20)
(waldo rips)test movie.r00(*/20)
(waldo rips)test movie.r01(*/20)
(waldo rips)test movie.r02(*/20)
(waldo rips)test movie.r03(*/20)
(waldo rips)test movie.r04(*/20)
(waldo rips)test movie.r05(*/20)
(waldo rips)test movie.r06(*/20) an so on.

if you are using @home service then there is an assortment of servers available to you and newsbin would be a better choice of newsreader for you since it can address multiple servers.

if you are using road runner then i am sorry there is probably no hope of actually retrieving anything off their news servers. they just seem to be the worst around.

many isp news servers provide less than acceptable service and as a result there are independant premium news servers that you can pay to use. these are generally the cream of the crop as far as news servers go offering the best completion for posts and the longest retention of those postings. i use agent configured with my isp news server and supliment it with http://www.easynews.com to get anything that is not complete on my regular news server. easynews costs $10 a month and you get 6 gig of download for that money. but i am always able to get anything i want from usenet this way and never have to request that reposts are made.

if you dont mind spending a little extra time downloading from slower servers then get newsbin and set it up with an assortment of free servers from http://www.serverseekers.com/ where you can find a listing of free news servers available to the public.

hope this helps, if i didnt make sense anywhere then ask me to explain better and i would be happy to oblige.

i almost forgot, NEVER USE NEWSFEEDS - THEY ARE THE WORST

_________________
peace out,
dumwaldo

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: dumwaldo on 2001-07-18 10:58:34 ]</font>

[MattB_99_30thTA]

Thanks for all the quick replies. Apparently my crack of ForteAgent wasn't right, as it won't do that automatically. My server is news.swbell.net . I'll take a closer look tonight and see what I can find out or d/l newsgrabber. The thing that threw me, was each message part that was subdivided was giving me an error that it didn't have all the parts to it. Is this bcause it fell off the server (retetnion) or other?

I'll take a look at that FAQ too. Thanks for the replies!

[dumwaldo]

when you see a header that looks like this,

(waldo rips)test movie.rar(1/20)


you need to have all 20 of them and you can highlight them and use the join button or right click and select join

if the header looks like this

(waldo rips)test movie.rar(*/20)

then agent joined the parts already. if it has a header that looks like that and an icon to the left of it that looks somewhat like a really fat #7 then agent tried to join it but could not find all the parts on your server so it is incomplete.