I’ve been into newsgroups for a few years now (mostly for those binaries…). On my desktops and laptop I usually use Xnews for the text groups and Newsleacher for all those binaries. These apps work great for most of my needs.
Yet it seemed like there were times when I would be at work and wanted to start a download from home. Previously I would either use a variant of VNC or Terminal Services to login to a home PC and start the download. Problem was that this was pretty clumsy. I kept looking for a good newsgroup client for Linux that would do the trick, but none of them really satisfied what I was looking for.
Then I came across HellaNZB and Zussaweb. HellaNZB is actually the client and Zussaweb is a PHP-based frontend. With these two programs I am able to remotely trigger a download to begin and the programs take care of the rest. HellaNZB will actually download only the needed PARs (if any), fix any needed repairs, extract the files, and remove the RAR files. What can be easier!?
All you need for HellaNZB is a couple of prerequisites, such as twisted and twisted-web. For essential functionality you would also want rar/unrar and par2cmdline. Zussaweb is real straight forward; only needing a couple of configuration changes to load/save to the directories I wanted.
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