Web Based News Leeching - NINAN - Usenet Made Easy

Posted on January 16, 2008 at 6:20 am

NINAN stands for NINAN Is Not A Newsreader, when I discovered this rather cool JAVA application a couple of years ago, that single piece of humour made me look twice at it. I am very glad that I did because it has become one of my most used applications.

Many computer enthusiasts these days have a PC they use as a home server, usually running an FTP server, often a web server and for sharing files across their home network. I remember having a discussion years ago with a friend of mine about “the PC in the cupboard” that we both intended to set up as both a server and an Internet gateway, this was back before ADSL and CABLE modems/routers became available.

I have had such a machine in my home for a decade or more now, and for the last 2 years NINAN has been installed as part of the application suite.

How can I describe NINAN? Well I guess by saying it is a web based application, developed in JAVA that can be used to leech files from a Usenet server. It includes in-built PAR checking and de-compression. Although this is nothing special in itself, these feature can be found in almost all major newsreaders, where NINAN comes into it’s own is as a server application that you can just forget about and use whenever you need it. If installed on a PC that is powered on 24/7 it becomes a one stop gateway to Usenet. Due to it using a browser based interface you can access it remotely if you know the IP address of your home server or have some form of DNS entry pointing at it.

Installation is really simple, just run the batch file in the program folder after you have extracted it and it starts up it’s own lightweight web server and DBMS serving over port 9090. Navigate to http://localhost:9090/ninan and configure it. You will need to subscribe to a Usenet account such as those offered over at newshosting.com, pretty cheap these days and due to the competition in this field we see article retention length being raised every month. A subscription to something like Newzbin is also required to actually locate the Usenet posts you wish to download. One other thing that can make NINAN a lot more useful is running it as a service using FireDaemon, this will ensure that if your home server reboots for any reason then NINAN will run again on startup and continue the download.

Above we see the main interface page, from here we can start a new download by entering the Usenet post ID into the field at the top right corner. We can monitor and prioritise our downloads and check to make sure everything is running ok. We can also pause, restart and close NINAN from this web page.

Once a download is finished NINAN will automatically parcheck the articles, download any repair files it needs, run a repair and then un-rar the entire post into a folder of your choice.

If you are a Usenet subscriber and have a spare PC sitting around then NINAN might be just what you need, fully unattended Usenet leeching that can be accessed remotely (I access mine via my smartphone and add new downloads as I think of things I want to leech) and run on a separate machine thereby not stealing the resources of you main desktop PC. Anyone who currently uses BitTorrent as their main file acquisition platform really needs to check out Usenet.

This is a guest post by Mac T. Wheeler who is an ex-corporate techie and now earns his living as a copywriter and blogger whilst living in the sunshine.

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