Anybody know much about .rar's and par's - newsgroups?

[tyders]

Hi all,

Just got broadband this weekend and am looking into newsgroups. I have 2 questions,

1. there are loads of files called .rar's and .par's etc. What are these and what do I do with them? Any threads you know of I can read etc?

2. Do i have to use the newsgroup for my server or can you use other like say, with BT but use AOL newsgroups?

Thanks all

[jimmalenko]

1. there are loads of files called .rar's and .par's etc. What are these and what do I do with them?

.rars are winRAR files. WinRAR is an alternative to Winzip. Both programs are just compression algorithms which enable better storage methods of files. You can put anything into a .rar file. It could be a movie, it could be a Word document...

[tyders]

Thanks mate,

So basically I just get the rar files, use winrar to de-compress the files. Are pars the same? Do i need both par and rar?

[jimmalenko]

I don't know about the pars but do a websearch.

[sterno]

par and par2 are types of parity file. They are used for error checking and recovery. http://parchive.sourceforge.net/

[The village idiot]

FSRaid, smartpar, quickpar, quickpar2

look for those.

[housepig]

I think you are only going to be able to access the newsgroups that your ISP subscribes to - so if AOL is your ISP, you're only going to get what AOL decides to put on their servers.

And last I had AOL (which has been a few years ago) their newsgroups were heavily filtered, very incomplete, and you had to use their newsreader programs - you couldn't use a 3rd-party app like FreeAgent with an AOL account.

[teegee420]

I strongly suggest using a premium new server. Some good ones that are reasonably priced are Easynews and Newzhosting. Both allow HTTP downloads which is pretty convenient. Usenestserver is good too but has lousy retention(only about 48 hours). Using only an ISP news server will make for a lot of missed and incomplete files.

[johns0]

Also in the newsgroups in a thread they usually have a faq which you can read which contains all the info you will need to know about rars,pars,par2,ace,requests posting and general etiquette and guidelines that give you an understanding of things in the ng.Giganews has 30 day retention on multiple binary postings.