Managing Your Accounts
The Accounts/News Servers tab gives you a way to manage your news servers accounts and control the way Binjet uses them. The tab contains a list of your accounts (initially empty) and a set of controls that let you create new accounts as well as remove, suspend, re-activate or test existing accounts, or change their details.
The Accounts List
The list displays the following information about each account:
- Account alias - a meaningful
name of the account that you've assigned to it. The alias should be
unique, descriptive and not too long. For example, you might want to
name an account with meganetnews.com as "meganet", and your
local ISP news server account as "local".
- Account state - is indicated
by an icon. A green circle indicates a ready to use account in stand-by
mode. A green triangle (arrow) indicates an actively used account. A
red icon means a suspended account.
- Account rank - this is a number
assigned by you, that defines how actively the account is being used.
By giving rank 1 to an account, you make it used very actively. Accounts
with rank 2 are used only if an article could not be retrieved from
rank 1 accounts. Accounts with rank 3 are used if rank 1 and 2 accounts
failed, and so on. Within the same rank, accounts are sorted alphabetically
by the aliases, and used in that order.
- Maximal connections number
- this is the limit on the number of connections that your news server
allows. You can verify this number with your news server admin. Usually,
this number can be found somewhere in the server information page. If
you set this number too low, your downloading performance me be not
as good as it can be. If you set this number too high, the server will
keep rejecting attempted connections because there are too many of them,
and this will, again, impact on performance. Please note that
if you want to use the same account in parallel in some other news reading
software, you have to adjust the number correspondingly and make sure
that the right number of connections is left to be used by Binjet.
- Connections in use - this column
shows number of connections to the server that are being actively used.
There may be more connections open, but idle. Binjet does not close
connections after finishing downloading. It keeps them for re-use. If
a connection is not actively used for a while, it gets closed by the
news server anyway.
- Downloaded KB - this is a rough amount of traffic downloaded using this account so far. This amount is only approximate because some traffic, e.g. traffic involved in establishing a connection, is not counted.
The Accounts Control Buttons
These are located to the right of the accounts list and let you manage the accounts. To do anything with an account, first select it by clicking on its alias and then use the button that does the wanted action.
- New - when clicked does nothing
except explaining how to add a new account. To add a new account, you
have to complete Account Details Form in the lower part of the dialog
and click on the Add New button on the form.
- Remove - removes an account.
- Suspend - removes account from
use, but leaves it on the list. You can re-activate the account using
the Activate button.
- Activate - re-activates a suspended
account.
- Test - tests the account by
attempting to open the max number of connections to it with 4 seconds
intervals between connections. The interval is there because some servers
may reject connections when they are opened too in a fast succession.
The Account Details Form
This form shows details of currently selected account. It also used to input details of a new account when creating it, or change details of an existing account. The form contains the following fields:
- Account alias - a meaningful
name of the account that you've assigned to it. The alias should be
unique, descriptive and not too long. For example, you might want to
name an account with meganetnews.com as "meganet", and your
local ISP news server account as "local".
- News Server - host name or
IP address of the news server that the account is using.
- Port - news server port number.
Normally, it is 119.
- Maximal number of concurrent connections
server allows - this is the limit on the number of connections
that your news server allows. You can verify this number with your news
server admin. Usually, this number can be found somewhere in the server
information page. If you set this number too low, your downloading performance
me be not as good as it can be. If you set this number too high, the
server will keep rejecting attempted connections because there are too
many of them, and this will, again, impact on performance. Please
note that if you want to use the same account in parallel in some
other news reading software, you have to adjust the number correspondingly
and make sure that the right number of connections is left to be used
by Binjet.
- User name - your user name
on this server. If the server does not require authentication, leave
this field blank. For example, most local ISP news servers do not
require authentication.
- Password - your password on
this server. If the server does not require authentication, leave
this field blank.
- Confirm password - this must
be identical to the password field, or the password won't get accepted.
If the server does not require authentication, leave this field blank.
- Password - your password on
this server. If the server does not require authentication, leave
this field blank.
- Account rank - this is a number assigned by you, that defines how actively the account is being used. By giving rank 1 to an account, you make it used very actively. Accounts with rank 2 are used only if an article could not be retrieved from rank 1 accounts. Accounts with rank 3 are used if rank 1 and 2 accounts failed, and so on. Within the same rank, accounts are sorted alphabetically by the aliases, and used in that order.
The Account Details Form Buttons
- Apply Changes - applies the
changes you've made to the currently selected account.
- Reset Data - discards any changes
that have been made, takes the data from the currently selected account
and fills the form.
- Add new - creates a new account
using the data in the form. First, account test is done to check if
the provided information is valid. If it is, a new account is created
and added to the list. You can interrupt the test at any point and still
add or discard the new account, but it is not recommended. The test
is done to make sure that the account configuration is correct.
- Help - displays this page.