First lets talk about Usenet

Usenet is a world-wide distributed discussion system. It consists of a set of “newsgroups” with names that are classified hierarchically by subject. “Articles” or “messages” are “posted” to these newsgroups by people on computers with the appropriate software.

These articles are then broadcast to other interconnected computer systems via a wide variety of networks. Some newsgroups are “moderated”; in these newsgroups, the articles are first sent to a moderator for approval before appearing in the newsgroup. Usenet is available on a wide variety of computer systems and networks, but the bulk of modern Usenet traffic is transported over either the Internet or UUCP.

What does this mean ? What does it have to do with News Servers ?

Its safe to say that almost every News Server feeds from Usenet, and if you’ll remember from the above that Usenet is basically a bunch of interconnected computers sharing information such as Articles or messages and that these Articles or messages are categorized within newsgroups. One very popular type of newsgroup is the binaries newsgroup which primarily has files rather then Articles or messages.

It is in the binaries newsgroups that you’ll be searching for files if you are looking to download games, movies, t.v. shows, applications, etc… and in order to download any of the files in a particular newsgroup, you’ll need to register with a binary news server. 

Registering with a binary news server together with an indexing service and a news reader client, will enable you to download pretty much anything.

Have you ever heard anyone mention an NZB file ? How about searching for something on the internet, have you ever come across an NZB file of something that you’ve wanted to download but have no idea what an NZB file is ?

In short an NZB file is nothing more then an XML file with file and header information for Usenet binary attachments.

Ok, now for the definition in english. Think of an NZB file as a container and inside of this container is information that points to file locations. An NZB file does not contain any files within itself and it is not an archive that can be extracted. It’s basically a file that tells another applications which files to download.

So what application would you open an NZB with ? Simple answer if you’re on a Mac you can use Unison if you’re on Windows do a search for usenet client. I’m not going to go into much more detail about opening NZB files and downloading, that’s beyond the scope of this article, but I will have another tutorial posted soon that covers downloading NZB files, configuring Unison, and extracting the downloaded parts.

So to summarize, if you don’t have a usenet account and you don’t have a usenet client then an NZB file will pretty much be useless to you. If you want to learn more then subscribe to my RSS feed. I’ll have a tutorial ready soon.