newsbin.com

Can I download the headers from one server and the files from another server?
For example,
I downloaded the headers from Astraweb but many rar files are incomplete (missing blocks per QuickPAR).

Thus, I would like to add another server (a trial), and add the Astraweb headers to the download list while the files (or missing blocks of the file?) are downloaded by the trial server. I assume that there will be no problems doing it this way?

BTW, if both servers are active, will some blocks of a file be downloaded by Astraweb and other [missing] blocks by the trial server? How does Newsbin decide which server to use for which blocks?

Newsbin does not care which server you get headers from.

If multiple servers are active it will simply try the next block from which server currently has an unused connection. If it fails to find it on one server then it will try the other one.

If you always want one server to be used preferentially, then set the second one to be a 'Fill' server. In such a case the Fill server only gets used after newsbin has failed to find a block on the non-Fill server(s).

I use two servers - Easynews for headers and fills and Virginmedia for most downloading.

I was getting a lot of incomplete headers until I set up the servers as follows -

Easynews Europe - headers and fills
Easynews USA - headers and fills
Virginmedia - no headers, main download.

After setting up Easynews to pull headers from both Europe and the USA I have never had a problem with incompletes since.I only tried this after reading a reply from Itimpi to another post - it really solved a frustrating problem.

The reason I don't pull headers from Virginmedia is because they do not seem to compress the data and it takes forever to download compared to Easynews.