SuperNZB
The Newsgroup NZB Downloader

Setup News Servers Window

The Setup News Servers Window can be opened by going onto the Setup menu and choosing Servers.

If you are having trouble connecting to your server, using SuperNZB's Test Server window might help. Go onto the Help menu and then to "Test News Server". (This feature was added in version 3.2.0.)

To use SuperNZB as effectively as possible, you must know how many simultaneous connections each of your news servers permits. Make sure to read the linked article if you don't know what this means. Using multiple connections is how SuperNZB achieves its speed. If you are waiting for an answer from your ISP, you can probably use "2" in the Connections box for now.

If your server allows a large number of connections, using them all is not always a good idea because your system or internet connection may not be able to keep them all fed with data. If you see connections giving a "stalled for" message, that's what is causing it, so just cut down the number of connections that you are using. In the majority of cases, using dozens of connections is not necessary. Start with a small number and then add more if needed.

On this window, you tell SuperNZB about the news servers that you have access to, and how you want the program to utilize them. When SuperNZB starts up, it finds all the servers that have their "Active" box checked, and then using the number of connections for each server, builds the list that you see on the Downloader window.

News servers are not perfect, and ideally you will want to have access to more than one to get maximum performance out of SuperNZB. When one server slows down, has to re-boot, or plain breaks down, SuperNZB will be able to continue downloading from the other server(s). Also, not all servers carry all newsgroups. So, when you obtain an NZB file, there is no guarantee that the posts it points to will be in a newsgroup that is on your server. If that happens, you will be completely unable to download the files.

There is no limit to the number of news servers to which you can gain access. Your ISP may provide a free server, you can sign-up with a third-party news service like ours, and perhaps your employer has a news server that you can use. For super-fast downloading, the more servers the better. Also, "completion" varies from server to server. This means that if a large file is posted in, say, 1,000 posts, and your server only has 990, then the completion is 99%. Having access to multiple servers insures that you can always get all of the available posts.

Name - Enter a nickname for your news server here. It can be anything such as "Cablemodem", "DSL Server", or "Dilbert".

Server URL - You must get this from your ISP. It is usually something like: news.yourisp.com. You can also use the IP address of the news server here. If you are calling your ISP, make sure to ask them for the "Usenet news server URL."

Username and Password - You must get these two items from your ISP. Sometimes your ISP will not require them, and in that case, don't enter anything here. Entering a username/password when they are not required can cause connections errors. Also, it is common for ISP's to re-arrange their authorization methods and not tell their customers. They may change your username/password and not tell you. So if SuperNZB all of a sudden can't logon to the server, that could be the cause.

Connections - See the comments at the top of this page. This is usually a number between 1 and 5 for free servers provided by ISP's, and 10-60 for third-party Usenet company servers.

Port & SSL - Please see our Usenet Port & SSL Settings page.

Active - Check this box if you want SuperNZB to add the server to the Downloader window. You may want to de-activate a server if you go over a monthly download limit, etc.

Set Newsgroup - NZB files contain a list of "article ID's" and SuperNZB works by asking the news server for each post (a.k.a. article) using these ID's. Some news servers require that programs first set the newsgroup before asking for posts in that group. Normally, that doesn't take very long, so you can keep this box checked if you don't want to bother with it. However, you can get a bit more speed by un-checking it for servers that do not require it. You can ask your ISP if the news server "requires the newsgroup to be set before using the ARTICLE command." If you can't get an answer from your ISP, you can try un-checking the box. If you don't get errors, then you can leave it like that. Since NZB downloading has become popular, most servers do not require this option to be turned on.

When you make changes to these settings, you must close the Downloader window and then re-open it before they take affect.