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Combining Headers From Multiple Server

This tutorial will show you how to use Binbot to automatically combine headers from multiple servers. This is useful if you have access to more than one server, and each server contains mostly incomplete posts. By combining headers from multiple servers, Binbot is able to reassemble posts fully, even if none of the servers contain complete posts.

Note: This tutorial applies to Binbot version 1.1 beta 3 or later.
  1. To define your servers, click on the menu Server > View All... (1), and click Add... to create each new server (2). See the Getting Started Guide Part 1 Step 3 for details on configuring servers.
    Define Servers
  2. Once all your servers are defined, choose the server that will be your primary server. This should be the server that has the most articles and the best retention. Select that server, click Edit... and then Advanced.... Click on the tab Multiple Servers (1) and select all the servers to be combined with your primary server. Click OK (3), then OK again.
    Define Servers
  3. Note that your primary server now shows up with a special icon (1) indicating that its headers are being combined with headers from other servers. Click on Go (2) to start loading headers from all servers simultaneously. The number of downloaded headers shown at the bottom of the screen (3) reflects the fact that 5,000 headers were downloaded from 4 servers for a total of 4 x 5,000 = 20,000 headers.
    Define Servers
  4. To visualize which parts are available on which server, right-click on an article, select Properties, and click on the Part Info tab (1). This screen shows you available and missing part numbers on each server.
    Define Servers
  5. When you download an article, Binbot automatically downloads each part from the appropriate server. If an article is available on more than one server, Binbot first tries to download the article from the server with the highest priority. If the article is not available on that server, it then tries from the server with the next highest priority, and so on. To change the priority of a server, bring up its properties, click on Advanced..., then click on the Multiple Servers tab (1). Edit the Priority value (2) and click OK (3).
    Define Servers
Note: See also the Getting Started Guide Part 4 for a tutorial on manually combining headers from multiple servers and newsgroups.