Astraweb is unfortunately known for occasionally having random incompletes. Having a backup server from another provider is the popular solution, but there is another way without having to purchase another usenet account.
The best trick is to set the EU Astraweb server as your backup server, assuming the US server is your primary. For some reason, this works most of the time. Taking this trick further, you can set Astraweb servers backup servers and use different ports. I’ve seen this help many times.
I wonder if using a different port connects you to a different server in the server farm giving you an additional chance. In fact, once when Astraweb having making a bad run of incompletes, their customer service told people to try different ports as a solution.
So if you’re using us.news.astraweb.com as your primary, I’d set up my servers like this in SABnzbd:
Primary
us.news.astraweb.com
Port: 119
Backup 1
eu.news.astraweb.com
Port: 119
Backup 2
us.news.astraweb.com
Port: 8080
Backup 3
eu.news.astraweb.com
Port: 1818
This gives you a good spread of servers and ports. You can easily play with different ports, even trying SSL servers as primary or backup.
Anyone running into problems should give it a try before investing in another usenet account or even jumping ship entirely.
For busy people on the run, you need to be able to manage SABnzbd from your android phone. Now you can manage your SABnzb server from anywhere. My favorite part is that if talking with people and someone mentions a movie, I can just look it up and have it ready to watch by the time I get home.
I love that web browser that’s included. I can use it to automatically load up NZBs from my favorite NZB Indexers. Automatically adding NZBs to from any Indexer is important and SABMobile gets it right. It gets even better with the inclusion of an RSS reader to make downloading newly uploaded content even easier.
SABMobile can handle http, https, and SSH connections. This way you can choose your level own level of security.
Everything you want in an remote SABnzbd app, SABMobile gets it done right every time.
• Handles configuration for several SABnzbd+ servers
• Handles several configurations per server (local, HTTPS, SSH, etc.)
• Works with SABnzbd version 0.5.x or greater
• Connects through HTTP, HTTPS (SSL), or HTTP over SSH
• Works over Wi-Fi, EDGE, and 3G
• Lists downloads on your server
• Can pause, resume, and remove downloads
• Displays download and upload rates, downloaded size, progress, and more
• Supports autorefresh (can be disabled if connected in 3G to reduce internet traffic)
• Can add direct link downloads (if copied from somewhere else)
• Can specify the category when adding a download
• Provides a Web view to directly add files to download while browsing
• Manages cookies (for authentication websites)
• Supports RSS feeds
• Lists new files to be downloaded in RSS feeds (one-click download)
• Can search for any file through configurable searchers
• Supports private searchers (see website)
• Can shutdown and restart server from the settings
• Efficient look and feel
• Multitasking
• Available in 10 languages: English, French, Dutch, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Spanish, and Finnish
Just click the link below to buy it and delivered to your phone.
JBinUp is breathing fresh air into the world of Usenet posting software. Even now, Powerpost is the dominating Usenet uploading software scene. JbinUp addresses some of the shortcomings in Powerpost.
Most notably JBinUp checks that all of your files were posted successfully and will reupload missing parts. Using a secondary Usenet server is where this feature really shines. You’ll know if your content is being propagated property through Usenet. It’s also very simple to generate your own NZB.
It’s written in Java, so you will need to have Java installed. My only substantial complaint of the software is the placement of the Subject field when setting up the post. It is easy to confuse the Job Title with the Subject field. I would put the subject field in a more prominent place.
It’s a great piece of software. Using this more and more is really selling me on becoming a full convert. At this point, I’m not even too sure why I use Powerpost anymore.
Posting from the CLI in Linux has its advantages. If you have a small VPS, you can quickly upload content. There is only one client that I’ve used that seems to still work.
Newsmangler is an easy to use program just for this purpose. Runs in python and there is little set up needed. Newsmangler is a simple little program written in Python that I’ve come to love.
It’ll create PAR2s and NZBs for you easily enough. And is multithreaded so you can take advantage of your full speed.
Use a text editor to fill in the sample.conf file with your posting name, email, and server information.
When executing the program, I found that you have to include the the subject flag, or the program won’t run. The only other error I ran across was during the middle of uploading a collection of files the program crashed. I think it was due to having so many files in the que, including a bunch of JPEGs. When I just had PAR2s and RARs queued up, it ran fine everytime.
This great little program is located on GitHub
The community has been clamoring for NZB completion checkers. With occasional, yet predictable, completion issues many people are wanting a way to check NZBs before they waste time and bandwidth.
The only one I’ve seen that seems to be worth using is NZBcc by Zoon.
Completion rates across all major providers are all pretty high. Unfortunately, even a small amount of missing articles can cause problems since many uploaders don’t always bother to create an acceptable amount of PAR2, even when they know completion will be a problem after a week or two.
It’s not the only NZB checker around, but it is the only one worth your time. Everyone should check out Zoon’s latest release.
http://www.zoon.dk/2011/11/04/nzbcc-version-0-8-2a-released/
With software like this, it’s no wonder that cable companies are struggling. Who needs a cable TV subscription when you can have Sickbeard autodownload new episodes of your favorite TV shows and CouchPotato autodownload movies. Both work together with SABnzbd, which you should be using anyways.
Setting up SABnzbd is pretty straight forward. It’s pretty much load up an NZB file and forget about it. SABnzbd will download, repair, and extract for you. Not to mention it will also manage backup servers for you if there are any missing parts on your primary.
Sickbeard is written in Python but also has windows binaries. Don’t download the windows binaries. You’ll always be behind on updates and new features, since Sickbeard is pretty slow on compiling new binaries regularly. The python source gets updated sometimes multiple times a week.
Running Python from the source shouldn’t be intimidating.
First all we want to do is download Python 2.7.x for Windows. Install and you’re almost ready.
Next we need to download the Zip file for SickBeard source on Git. Extract the folder inside the Zip file.
In this example, we’re going to assume that we’ve extracted the folder to C:\midgetspy-Sick-Beard-8d7c483
Next we’ll make a shortcut on the desktop.
- The shortcut will point to C:\Python27\pythonw.exe
Once that is created, we want to right click that shortcut, go to properties, and change the target to:
- C:\Python27\pythonw.exe “C:\midgetspy-Sick-Beard-8d7c483\SickBeard.py”
That will allow you to run the latest version of SickBeard and it will keep itself updated. With that short cut you can even drop it into your StartUp folder so it will automatically startup everytime Windows loads.