myNZB

A lightweight NZB downloader (originally hosted here)

What's this myNZB

myNZB is a simple NZB client; its main purpose is not to be a flashy super-duper 1000 features NZB software but merely the kind of software you invoke like this: myNZB -s my.nntp.server file1.nzb file2.nzb ... fileN.nzb and then, magic, it will donwload the content of the NZB.

Features

Naturally it has some nice features:

• Multithread download (you can set how many threads/connections it can use)
• Uses a connection pool (tries to minimize TCP/IP traffic)
• Automatically retries to retrieve failed files
• Uses libnotify to signal the progress of NZB files (dynamically - no need to install it to run myNZB)
• Written in C++
• Depends only on yydecode and libmlx2 packages/libraries

And that's it. You'd say: is not that much!, but think... what do you need an NZB client for? Donwload NZB and notify what is going on. Easy!

How to use it

Usage: myNZB [options] file0.nzb file1.nzb ...
	-s: NNTP server to connect (use the colon notation to specify the port, eg. "nntp.server.com:119")
	-u: NNTP username (default none, eg. "")
	-p: NNTP password (default none, eg. "")
	-c: number of parallel connections to NNTP server (default 2)
	-t: wait time (ms) in between dowloading NZB segments (default 0)
	-y: yydecode path (default to: "/usr/bin/yydecode")
	-o: output directory (default "./")
	-d: create a subdirectory with NZB file name for each NZB to process (default not set)
	-x: percentage value to allow retry download segments with errors (default 0.2)
	-r: reset TCP/IP connections with NNTP server for each segment
	-n: do NOT notify file activity through libnotify (dynamically loaded)
	-l: set log level:
		0 No log
		1 Errors only
		2 Warnings and errors
		3 Info, warnings and errors (default)
		4 Debug, info, warnings and errors
	-z: NZB segments max retries (default 3 retries)
	-C: set wait time (ms) when creating new NNTP connections (default 0, no timeout)
	-e: use SSL connections
	-F: set to force writing into temporary files instead of memory (default not set)
	-P: (try to) skip the ".par2" files
	-T: set temporary directory (default "./")
	-S: set recv timeout (msec) on NNTP connections (default 2000 , 2 sec)
	-W: specify a port:password (optional) for the report HTTP web server (default 0, no web server)
	-Y: strict search for yEnc encoding in NNTP subject (default false)
	-h: print this help and exit
	-v: print version and exit

How to build

Requires following dev libraries to be installed: ssl, xml2 and crypto.

Hints

• When using -T specify /dev/shm to write tmp files in memory, not on disk (less disk usage)
• Specify the -P flag to skip the par2 files; usually those are not needed

ChangeLog

• 0.3.0
  • ADD usage of SSL conections (and verification) through openssl
• 0.2.4
  • ADD ability to save files in subdirectories
  • FIX web server now uses password instead of directory
• 0.2.3
  • ADD ability to skip par files
  • ADD memory manager to optimize mem allocation for buffers
  • ADD log debug mode (default is disabled)
  • FIX (main.cpp) now properly try to parse all the NZB files before throwing any error
  • FIX (notify.cpp) restored original notifications
  • FIX (nzb.cpp) now managers/pools/singletons are properly initialized in ST segment of code
  • FIX (nzb.cpp) now fetch_body/fetch_article/dot_unstuff properly terminate the buffer with '\0'
• 0.2.2
  • ADD report HTTP web server (useful if you want to see what is going on from your phone/away)
  • FIX (nzb.cpp) remove in auto_filer destroyer was calling its method instead of ::remove
  • FIX (connection.cpp) close socket only when valid
  • FIX (notify.cpp) now notifications are being updated; 2 after other very fast will be overwritten (you'll se only last one) but should not have memleaks
• 0.2.1
  • ADD option to set NNTP connections timeout
• 0.2.0
  • First version

Known issues

• Google Chrome is not able to render the progress bar when the web report is being used. A bug has been opened. I hope they'll fix this ASAP.
• Google Chrome doesn't refresh the page when Refresh button is being hit. This is actually a defect of Chrome (another sigh); then next revision of myNZB will try to cope with this Chrome defect. For now, with Chrome, just reload the page without hitting refresh.
• Some memory is could be leaking due to libnotify usage (I have to investigate)

F.A.Q.

Why did you develop it? I was using LottaNZB but that software realies on HellaNZB that with my ISP does suck (a lot of corrupted/unfinished files), so began with the purpose to understand what was going wrong with this software and my ISP. I first developed four stupid lines of code, then I've put them together a little bit better and finally I realized I was going to incorporate some other cool features so...I ended up polishing the code and releasing it.

Why C++ and not ...? Because C++ allows you to have some kind of flexibility, compactness and speed that many other languages don't offer. Plus I managed to recicle a lot of classes I already wrote for other projects.

Some operations/classes aren't very clear to me. Don't worry send me an email and I'll explain why...if the comment is interesting I'll post on the website.