Problem with NZB-Import and Net-Captive

[barabbas]

Hey,

this is a pretty unusual problem and I can totally understand if you won't address it at all, but I wanted to report it anyway.
I live in a dorm where every 12 hours a captive blocks HTTP traffic until you click a login button on an internal website. I run sabnzbd on a server where I don't use the browser at all, so I don't get to see the captive. As long as the http traffic is blocked, sabnzbd is unable to import an nzb from the auto import directory. I don't really understand why, as there is no need to request anything http related. After having logged in on the captive I have to remove the nzb from the directory and put it in again, only then will it work.
To clarify, usenet access is not blocked, so if I am not logged in on the captive I still can download stuff, just not import the nzb.

Thanks for your time.

[shypike]

What does the logging file say. Does it record seeing the NZB files and rejecting them.
SABnzbd keeps track of the files it sees. Once a file is rejected it will not
be retried unless there is some change (size or time/date).
I cannot think of any reason why an import should be blocked
while there is no internet connectivity possible.

The only HTTP traffic (outgoing) that SABnzbd does is this:
- One a week check for a new version (you can disable that)
- Reading RSS feeds (optional)
- Getting an NZB from a URL (which you do not do).

Anyway even if SABnzbd's HTTP outgoing traffic would block, that will not stop its download activities.
At least it shouldn't

[barabbas]

Sorry, should've included that in the first place.
"Invalid NZB file test.nzb, skipping (reason=error in processing external entity reference, line=1)". That is a warning, I couldn't find anything related in the log. Will set the threshold to debug and try again when the captive blocks traffic.

So, looking at the typical NZB I'd say it tries loading the reference to http://www.newzbin.com/DTD/nzb/nzb-1.0.dtd or http://www.newzbin.com/DTD/2003/nzb, fails to connect and thus fails to import the nzb at all. Just a guess. You could probably reproduce this problem by blocking port 80 for sabnzbd.

[shypike]

OK, so it could be the XML library we use.
It might be trying to get to newzbin just to read the DTD.
Which is not very useful, because I cannot imagine it actually uses the DTD.
You might circumvent this by adding this to your hosts file:

Code: Select all

127.0.0.1 www.newzbin.com

Well, as long as you do not need to access newzbin.com from your server.

I'll look into this.

[barabbas]

Good idea, thanks. Could've thought of that myself.

[shanefer]

I'm having the same issue.  When I send SAB a nzb file I get the following (as an example) as a warning:

2009-12-06 17:05:35,318 WARNING: Invalid NZB file selected_reports_20091207-000306.nzb, skipping (reason=error in processing external entity reference, line=30)

That's an example with "selected file"... but I seem to get the same with any file.  I upgraded to 0.5.0, but was having the same problem in 0.4.12

[shypike]

The problem will be solved in Beta2.
BTW: it doesn't plead for the quality of this particular security program.
Although reading the DTD file from newzbin is not necessary,
it is perfectly correct behavior.