Comments on: How to use Virginmedia Newsgroups with Grabit

By: Marty

Marty — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 21:34:58 +0000

my settings in grabit are:

hostname: news.virginmedia.com
Port: 119
no name or pass.
max connections: 10

are you sure your on virgin :|

By: skp

skp — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 00:52:23 +0000

I can’t get it to connect to news.virginmedia.com at all! I’ve only just found this and when I enter that address into the setup wizard, it sits for a while then tells me it can’t find the usenet hostname… have they changed the address?

By: GT

GT — Mon, 02 May 2011 09:18:04 +0000

Hi, New to this – I’m using grabit and was using newsfarm.asm2.shemes.com as my server. Just moved it over to virgin media – but both that I’m using, anything older than 21 days I’m getting article not found when I try to download. I’m a VIP customer of NBZ matrix so I can access all NBZ’s.

ANy idea why this is happeneing – newer (under 20 days old) nbz files am having no problem with at all.

By: shane

shane — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 18:39:57 +0000

hi , thank you for your info on how to use virginmedia. ok
i did what you said D/L Grabit and stalled it and all that but it was shit speed well only like 600kbps max and could get only 3 threads running at one time and what was worse of all was that the 70% of all the D/L where damaged and unrepairable i mean all the files even Quick Par could not fix them i was really pissed as the the D/L where blu-ray all like 20+GB this went on for a week then i thought fook it and throw grabit in the bucket and found another reader(altbinz) easy to set up and yes it works 100% no more damaged files and i have it set to 50 threads and have had no prob.. yet and the speed not to bad either at about 5 to 6mbps not as fast as the torrent site i go to but i dont have to seed it back, if anyone wants to try the reader i am using you can get it here http://www.newsgroupreviews.com/alt-binz-guide.html it free

By: alex

alex — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 20:55:54 +0000

Very informative, thanks for your article. I’ve never downloaded via Usenet before but I’ve always seen adverts of it but never got around to actually try (didn’t feel like subscribing), but now that i discovered that i could have tried it ages ago I feel a bit silly :-P

I’m so far really impressed with the speed, it’s like having a good seeded torrent but it doesn’t impair your network performance as much compared as a torrent of a similar download speed (must be the multiple tcp request of the swarm i guess)

There’s 2 questions I have though:
Is there any way to encrypt the downloads? the server at 119 doesn’t support ssl and as ugly privacy is getting in uk i like to keep all my network traffic encrypted if possible. Maybe somebody knows how to encrypt it through ssh tunneling or so?

the second question is what’s the maximum amount of connections that the server supports? I’ve seen different opinions from around 5 till 20 so i’m not too sure of which settings i should use of if it matters that much really (it means parallel connections, right?)

by the way i’m using this as a client http://sabnzbd.org/ in a Linux environment
is multi-platform and it works really well, thought you might like to try it

cheers and thanks again

By: Marty

Marty — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 09:56:24 +0000

hi Tony, could it be that your on 10mb? It Could be your ISP (Virgin) is throttling your speed?

By: Tony

Tony — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:58:45 +0000

I’m using grabit now with virgin. I did use to download 2400kbs on any file i wanted. Every download i did i was getting 2400kbs but now im only getting between 1000 – 1300kbs. Why am i losing 1000kbs?? Ive done test speeds for my broadband and its giving me the reading i’m looking for so why has grabit not giving me the full downloads??

By: Derek

Derek — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 17:40:23 +0000

I was running Grabit on virginmedia and used to get great download speeds.(800kbps) using just three threads. But recently had to restore my pc and grabit would only download at 100-200kbps. but just realised i can increase the number of threads (in server Porperties) and this again increased my speed. ;)

By: Marty

Marty — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 11:11:05 +0000

Well if your getting files to download and extract your doing better than most! if your speeds are fluctuating it could be down to a few things, the virgin ports which you are connecting too, you could try another port number, theres been a lot of talk over the past week or so, about virgin and how they could be throtteling the newsgroup/torrent traffic but normal sites like iplayer and youtube could be working ok, you could try changing provider to the likes of Astraweb, (adverts all over this page) they seem to the best around at this time (im my opinion..)

By: shak

shak — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 17:20:25 +0000

Hi. I am new to this so please bear with me. I found this website a few days ago and followed the instructions exactly. However, I am getting really slow speeds. I am on the VM 10MB package but my download speeds do not exceed 150-200kbps.
The first day I used grabit/newsgroups I had speeds of upto 1500kbps! I don’t know what is wrong now. Does it depend on the file that you download or should it be a consistent speed regardless?
It can’t be VM throttling my connection because I started a download today and had’nt reached anywhere near the maximum download limit.
Any help?
I have tried a wired and wireless connection and it makes no difference.