NewsFinder

(c) 1999-2006 Scott M. Baker, SB-Software, smbaker@sb-software.com

NewsFinder is a tool designed to help you find public access news servers. Public access news servers are news servers that allow anyone (i.e. not just the customers of the ISP) access without a password. They are extremely rare.

NewsFinder falls into my "special purpose/expert tool" category. It is not indended for novices. If you don't know what a public access news server is, or don't know why you would need to use one, then you can probably stop here. The documentation is sparse, it hasn't been as thoroughly "idiot-proofed" as my other software, and it might not even do anything useful for you.

Here's how NewsFinder works:

1. You provide a starting news server (and authentication if necessary). This is the server that you normally use -- i.e. your pay server.
2. You provide a newsgroup in which you wish to focus attention of the search.
3. NewsFinder then queries the server to find out the hostnames/paths of all messages on that server.
4. For each hostname that is found, NewsFinder tries to connect to it. If the connection succeeds, then that host is queried for more hostnames. If it fails, then too bad....

Notes:

Public access news servers are extremely rare. I did a simple search and the only one I found was "news.frontiernet.net". This would indicate that either 1) NewsFinder doesn't work, or 2) There just aren't that many public access news servers.

Low Latencies and High Throughputs are good.

If that really is the case, then perhaps NewsFinder doesn't even serve a useful purpose! :(

Revision History

• Version 1.0
  • Initial Release
• Version 1.1
  • Require either host or path headers, but do not require both to consider server good
• Version 1.2
  • Fix latency/throughput sometimes computed wrong
• Version 1.3
  • Update to latest version of code base
  • Fix throughput wrong on groups with lots of headers
  • Fix program not shutting down when close clicked. Problem was workers stuck in connect syscall.
  • Grab hostnames from msgid, because some servers don't do postinghost or path

Recommended Software:

Android Newsgroup Downloader is a binary newsreader intended for pulling down large files, such as mpeg video, mp3 music, and ISO cd/dvd images. It's a very full -featured tool for the alt.binaries newsgroup user.

QuadSucker/News is a primarily intended to be a picture downloader, but also has a pick and choose mode that can handle large multi-part binaries.

Binary Vortex is an easy to use usenet picture downloader intended for novice users. Power-users can graduate to more powerful tools such as SBNews, Android, or QuadNews as the need arises to download more complex multipart binaries or to have more control over the download process.

Be sure to visit the SB-Software Website for more shareware and freeware internet utilities.