HellaNZB options and configuration

2006-10-13 Computing · Me

As regular readers know I am rather partial to a Usenet program called HellaNZB. Its basically a python application that deals with downloading archives from Usenet either being supplied with a NZB file or a newbin ID. After this is decodes, unrar’s, and pars the file if necessary.

I have recently upgrade to a new server with alot of disk space (on RAID5) and I took the decision not to install HellaHella. I have posted up details of getting HellaHella working through apache2, but its not worth it. This time I am going for a pure Debian/Ubuntu setup and to get the framework installed for HellaHella requires far too much fuss. The Egg support is wrong for one thing.

So I am now using ZussaWeb. This is a PHP based webpage through which you can get various information from HellaNZB and upload NZB files. One feature I have requested is to be able to input NewzBin IDs but it seems one of the developers doesn’t have access to Newzbin at the moment so I might end up writing a patch myself.

Zussaweb is far easier to install than the Pylons based hellahella, and uses less resources if you are already running apache2 than the development http server that Pylons uses. I see no reason to use Pylons anymore (and frankly Django as a framework is far far better but thats a different story).

One this that I always forget with HellaNZB is the command line options which if you are running HellaNZB as a daemon processs files off XMLRPC calls to HellaNZB to do various tasks. For instance:

hellanzb.py enqueuenewzbin 1234567

would contact Newzbin.com and start processing the files with the ID 1234567. I have hellanzb.py under /usr/bin/ so its automatically on my path. Further options are available to view in the python code that comes with HellaNZB in the file: Hellanzb/HellaXMLRPC/__init__.py

Here are some more useful commands:

hellanzb.py pause<br /> hellanzb.py continue<br /> hellanzb.py shutdown<br /> hellanzb.py status

I have put into the optional excerpt of this post a sample from the code with more calls in and hopefully this will provide an easy reference to this underdocumented area.