Adam SMASH!

If you use Usenet at all to get your linux distributions or apps for linux etc, then you may benefit from an application called HellaNZB. It is a daemon that runs in linux and looks in a certain directory in your home folder for NZB files. NZB files are basically an XML file that tells a program that can handle NZB files which newsgroup to look in and which posts to grab.

HellaNZB does much more than just grab the files from usenet however. It will use Par2 to check the validity of the files if PARs were included in the NZB, and then unRAR the files if they were archived on usenet, (they usually are) and then it will delete the downloaded RAR and PAR files leaving only the extracted file. When I first found HellaNZB, it made my linux/usenet experience MUCH better. I was dissatisfied with Pan and a couple other newsreaders I had tried, and getting Newsleecher to work in Wine was more hassle than it was worth usually.

To get started on Ubuntu, you will need to issue the following command in your terminal:

This will install HellaNZB and UNRAR from the repos, and once it’s done, you’re done, it’s installed. However you do need to configure it, inserting your usenet server name and login, which I’ll show you next.

The configuration file is located at /etc/hellanzb.conf. Before we start HellaNZB we’ll want to make some changes in here, so issue the command to edit the file in terminal:

I am using GEdit, but you can use nano or vi or whatever editor you’re most comfortable with.

The configuration file that HellaNZB comes with is pretty much ready to go except for one small detail. It will need to be told your usenet server name and login at the very least. Find the line in the configuration file that starts with defineServer. This is where we will be entering our info. I use astraweb, so:

If your usenet server requires no authentication, then you would comment the first username and password lines and uncomment the second ones. Many ISP based, non-premium servers require no authentication. Premium servers like Astraweb and Giganews do however. I highly recommend Astraweb, $11 a month and a full year’s retention. Hard to beat.

You can also set your connections below the server and login information. If your usenet server allows you to make multiple connections to their server, then you would adjust this by changing the default value for connections to whatever number you want. I personally leave mine at 5. Also, if you are using SSL to connect as I am in my example above, you will want to change the SSL setting to True, it’s default is False and it may error out when trying to connect.

One more setting to change, if you want HellaNZB to UNRAR the files it downloads (if they are RARed to begin with), then change the Hellanzb.SKIP_UNRAR setting to False

Now your HellaNZB is basically ready to go. There are some other settings however, and the .conf file is pretty self-explanitory on these. You may configure it to your liking. It is a bit beyond the scope of this guide to explain all of the settings in the .conf file however, so for now I will just show you how to start the program once the config file is all done.

You can start HellaNZB as a standalone program, or as a daemon. The daemon option is the one I use, since I like to just drop an NZB file into the queue directory and let Hella do its thing, so this is the option I will illustrate here.

Execute the following command in your terminal:

This forks the HellaNZB daemon and exits. Now HellaNZB is running and monitoring its queue directory for NZB files. the queue directory by default is located at /home/username/.hellanzb/nzb/daemon.queue NOTE: This directory will not be created until you start HellaNZB for the first time.

All you do is drop a NZB file in the above directory, and HellaNZB will begin downloading it. And it wil UNRAR the resulting files into the /home/username/.hellanzb/done directory.

You can monitor HellaNZB from the command line by issuing the command:

And that’s it. You can feel free to add the command “hellanzb -D” to your ubuntu startup programs so that it will start when Ubuntu starts, or you can just start it manually whenever you want to download from usenet.

PROTIP: in the configuration file, there is a setting titled Hellanzb.LIBNOTIFY_NOTIFY, set this to True to enable little popups in your desktop to tell you what HellaNZB is doing. It’ll let you know when it’s done with a queue so you don’t have to keep checking ever 5 seconds with hellanzb status

EDIT:
If you ever happen to drop a new NZB in the daemon.queue directory and hellanzb shows it queued but does not download it, check the other subdirectories in the .hellanzb/nzb dir. daemon.current might have a corrupt NZB in there that hellanzb doesn’t know what to do with. It happened to me today and I spent about an hour troubleshooting python settings and Twisted and some other stuff before I looked there. Just a public service announcement from your local usenet expert! :)

Click here to see my writeup on SABnzbd, a far superior usenet downloader for linux. If you are trying to start out using usenet in linux, please use SABnzbd instead of HellaNZB, it really is that much better. It’s still being actively developed for one thing!