I thought I would put together this little tutorial as it took me a while to get a setup I really liked. I had used Unison in the past but it just didnt seem the best solution in my eyes.

Anyway, here is what to do.

This tutorial assumes you already have a newgroup account.

The application we are going to be using here is called SABnzbd.

Now, there isn’t actually an OS X version of this program. Just a Windows and Linux version. No need to worry though, because some kind person is regulary compiling the source code of the Linux version and porting it to OS X. This can be found here.

On this page, you will see the download links on the right-hand side. Download the lastest version. Once download, extract the Zip file (if Safari didn’t do it automatically for you).

Copy the SABnzbd application to your applications directory (or wherever you prefer). Then launch it.

Once launched, your browser should open at the following page http://192.168.1.1:8080/sabnzbd/

This may differ depending on your network setup. You will probably want to bookmark this page for future access. Now click the “Config” tab, then “Servers“. Here you can enter your connection details. Once entered, click “Add server”.

That is basically it. You are now ready to download. You may want to go through all the sub-settings in the “[b]Config” tab. When on any page, click the “Help” tab, which will take you to the project Wiki to explain the settings in more detail.

Click the “Home” tab. There are 3 main ways to add files to your queue.

1) Upload an NZB.

2) Specify the URL of an NZB

3) Enter postid of a report on Newzbin.com (This option is only available after entering your Newzbin username and password)

Once you have added your files. You can then click the “Queue” tab to see the files in the queue. Here you can reorder the queue, or click a title in the queue to see individual file details.

Depending on your settings in the “Config” tab, and the option you selected when adding the file to the queue, once the download completes, the files will be checked. If the file needs repairing, enough PAR2 files will be downloaded to complete the repair. Once the repair has completed, it will be unpacked. Job done.

Now for the exciting stuff

Obvousily, as this application is all controlled through your web browser, you can access this from any where in the world any time you want. All you need to do is setup your router to forward port 8080 to the machine running SABnzdb. You may need to use a dynamic IP service such as DynDNS. These steps are beyond the scope of this tutorial.

To make things EVEN EASIER, there is a plugin for FireFox called nzbdStatus. What this does is, it adds an icon in the bottom left of the FireFox window that show you the status of your downloads, you can pause and unpause the queue – from anywhere in the world.

Also, this plugin integrates with Newzbin. It automatically adds a new icon on the report listings. Clicking this icon sends the files to your download queue. Again, this can be done from ANYWHERE in the world.

I think that about covers everything. I hope this is a good starter. if there are any queries, please don’t hesitate to ask. Hopefully I can then refine this document.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 11:17 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.