The 5-Step Binaries Tutor
Step 1. What Are Binaries?Step 2. How Do I Find Binaries?
Step 3. How Do I Download Binaries?
Step 4. How Do I Reassemble Binaries?
Step 5. How Do I Repair Binaries?
Software And Configuration Tips
USENET News Services To Download Binaries
3. How Do I Download Binaries?
To download binaries you will need a newsreader and access to a USENET news server. The news client used in this binaries tutor is NewsLeecher©. It comes with a 15-day trial so you can learn how to download binaries then switch to another program after the trial ends, if you like. For the USENET news server, look to your Internet Service Provider (ISP). The server's address is likely: news.yourisp.com. If your ISP does not provide a news server, you can subscribe to a third-party News service that will give you access to a news server for a nominal fee.
Just like your email client is configured with mail servers to download mail, the newsreader will be configured with the news server to download binaries. You can see how to configure the newsreader here. This link also appears at the end of this tutor, so feel free to read on for now.
WARNING: Like any shared file, downloaded binaries can be infected. Minimize risks by scanning all extracted binaries with a top-rated anti-virus program and multiple anti-spyware scanners before using the files. Even so, there is no guarantee that a file from the wild is clean, and certain types of infections such as rootkits can cause serious consequences including the need to reformat and reinstall the system, so DOWNLOAD BINARIES AT YOUR OWN RISK.
Finding the Binary File You Want
You can search for USENET binaries by using a website dedicated to indexing them. This is similar to using a website to search for torrents. In this binaries tutor we will be using NZBIndex.nl, (NZB Index) but there are several popular sites.
Before files are posted to USENET binary newsgroups, they are compressed into the .rar format. RAR files are similar to ZIP (.zip) files but they can do something the ZIP format cannot. Using RAR, a large file can be broken up into smaller pieces called chunks or parts. These numbered parts form an archive, that when downloaded and recombined, recreate the original file. This allows large binaries of up to several gigabytes to be posted to USENET in chunks of 15, 50 or 100-Megabyte (MB) parts. A large file could then have over 100 parts that must be separately found and downloaded.
Luckily, a little index file called an .nzb (short for Newzbin) is generated by the indexing website. The .nzb lists all of the chunks that belong to the archive, provides their header ID tags for retrieval, and includes a time stamp revealing when they were uploaded. Import an .nzb file into a newsreader, and the newsreader will automatically retrieve all parts of the archive for you.
In our example I searched the NZBIndex.nl website for CentOS, a Linux package. Below is a screenshot of the results...
Notice the columns on the right with the red arrows. When you find a file you want, check the Size column to see how large the file or archive is.
Now look at the Age column. Remember, the website is only indexing files, not archiving them, and inclusion in the index doesn't mean that your specific news server will still have that file available for you. Binaries expire off news servers and ISPs typically purge their news servers of binaries every 15-30 days. If using your ISP's news server to download binaries, you will only be able to download recently posted files. To get access to a news server with longer binary retention times of up to a year or more, you can optionally subscribe to a third-party USENET service.
When you decide on the file you want, glance at the line in green beneath the title, circled on the image above. It will tell you how many files make up the archive. In this case we can see that 86 files must be downloaded to complete the archive for the 4.05GB CentOS file.
Getting The NZB File
Once it's been confirmed that the archive is complete, click the Get NZB button (red arrow below).
This triggers open the NewsLeecher© newsreader that you will have installed, which automatically imports the NZB and queues all the parts or chunks for download as seen in the screenshot below.
Default desktops will have a white background.
For Eagle-Eyed Readers: When I originally wrote this tutor I was using NewzLeech.com as the binaries index site, but it went down shortly after. I made new screenshots for the alternate site, NZBIndex, but the original CentOS archive I downloaded was a slightly different flavor. The screenshot above with the imported files reflects the original archive, which contained 90 files versus 86, and is version 5.2 vs 5.4.
The Actual Download
At this point we don't have the files yet, but pointers to each file. These pointers are also called parts, even though they are links to the parts. Notice the Queue tab is selected in the shot above, allowing you to view the queued parts. On the Queue tab see [90/12 Paused] indicating that 90 parts were imported and 12 of those are in pause mode. We'll get to why 12 are paused later, but for now you begin the download by clicking the Connect icon at the top left. The software retrieves the queued files from the news server, downloading them to your hard drive.
Once the chunks have downloaded (all but the 12 in pause mode), you will need to reassemble them into the single, original file, so let's move on to Step 4.
Step 4. How Do I Reassemble Binaries?
