Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm struggling with sickbeard. Mainly in the 'backlog' situation.

Last night it managed to download (at some point) the most recent Big Bang Theory (despite both being aired same day I believe) but I can't seem to get it to download the backlog stuff.

Anyone able to shed any light on this?

I have never managed to get sickbeard to work..

It depends which NZB providers you have set up. By default, most post an RSS feed of what new shows have been added, and that's what Sickbeard scans. So a show from 3 months ago it won't pick up.

Some of the providers maintain a full list, but I can't remember which. Which ones do you have turned on.

Sickbeard is pretty crap when it comes to backlog management, there isn't really a way to force a full backlog run. You have two choices.
Either wait for sickbeard to run it's backlog search once a week, or go into each show and click the magnifying glass next to each episode. You have to click each one, but you don't have to wait for it to find each episode before clicking the next...

I hadn't got anything other than womble in there. I've just set the search provider to newzbin and got an error as follows

"2011-09-26 09:59:09.890000 SEARCHQUEUE-BACKLOG-192061 :: Error parsing date from Newzbin RSS feed: strptime() argument 1 must be string, not None"

When I try that it fails and gives me red cross next to it.

No wait, it's decided to work now.

It must have been just the newzbin thing I needed to set.

So yes, thank you for helping me discover what was wrong. Always something stupidly simple in th end isn't it?

IME you really really want to use NZBMatrix as your provider

I didn't know of them until trying out sickbeard. May do later but I have Newzbin paid for until the end of the year.

Newzbin doesn't seem to want to work with sickbeard but sickbeard index does.

Ah I meant NZBMatrix as your nzb file provider, not your usenet provider.

Sign up to NZBMatrix, pay 8 quid (I think) to become a VIP member, which gives you an API code you can put into sickbeard, so your searches will search the whole nzb archive and not just the last weeks rss feed. Backlog problems solved

Ideally you want to have as many NZB providers as possible. I use nzbsrus, nzbmatrix, and the free ones Sickbeard lists that I forget what they're called.

*makes notes*

I did used to have nzbsrus up and running too, but actually found that I had less problems if I just used NZBMatrix. Might be different now, but nzbsrus used to be very unreliable in terms of uptime and being able to actually grab the nzb file. Since turning everything off apart from NZBMatrix, I never have any problems anymore

There was a point where it handed off shite NZBs, yes. Switched the priority to put NZBMatrix above it, and now they've sorted it out it works as a nice backup.

Cool, I'll drop it back in then

I thought Sickbeard/Sab were supposed to delete the download directories after it had finished. They're not. Is there something I've missed?

For some bizarre reason it insists on having a local directory for the show, even though if you have Sickbeard hand off to SABNZBD+ it never gets around to using those directories.

Possibly, i know mine does. It is Sab that does that so have a poke around there.

I had missed something. I had 'keep original files' ticked because I am an idiots. Signed up for NZB matrix now and all seems to be well.

I don't see the issue here, keep looking, it could be something else.

I keep having the problem that Sabnzbd+ keeps unloading itself at random. Sometimes it lasts a week before I notice it isn't running, sometimes it lasts a day.
Nothing in the logs, it just seems to unload itself.

I thought it was the latest build, so went back to 0.6.7, it still did it, went back to 0.6.6 and it didn't do it for ages. Thought it was fixed, but now it is quitting by itself again.

Bloody thing

I still don't understand how to set it all up..

Is there an idiots (Kov) guide?

There isn't. It's really difficult to find decent info on how to do it. However I can probably help now I know what I'm doing with it.

There's youtube tutorials but they go on forever and aren't very clear.

It is horrendously complex, but we have a previous thread which may help

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6429

Most specifically, I used these two links when I setup my install
http://www.sickbeard.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10
http://christopher-williams.net/2010/08 ... ick-beard/

It's not that bad. When I lost my server's HDD and had to reinstall from scratch, it took less than an hour from beginning to end, including waiting around for stuff to download.

First time round it took a bit longer than that, I can guess...

Add to that the additional complexity of doing it on OSX, and learning about usenet at the same time, I found it frustrating, and I basically install and play around with applications in different environments for a living
If you aren't super-techy then I stand by my horrendously complex statement.

If something takes an hour to set up, it's complicated.

An hour for a Geek with a doctorate at that!

Malc

An hour for a geek with a doctorate in geek!

You having any joy on this yet? It took me a fair while to set up but I think I have it pretty much sorted now.

If it helps, I can take a screen shot of each of my settings and email them to you?

Although admittedly, a lot of the settings I used are probably wrong and you may be best copying someone elses .

Not been home to set it up yet...


I am currently 150 miles from home!

Kov didn't even know what usenet is so I don't think that it's going to be much use to him.

True and I have not had time to play this weekend...

For those of you who want to try this out for much freeness

http://www.xsusenet.com

are doing a free binary usenet account at the moment, limited to 1mbit and 2 connections, but i've signed up and will use it as a backup server