[vox-tech] grabit

[Troy Arnold]

On Fri, Aug 08, 2008 at 05:05:11PM -0400, David Rosenstrauch wrote:
> harke wrote:
> > Is anyone here familiar with a windows app
> > called grabit? I is used to view and download
> > from binary usenet groups.
> > My wife has been using it and it totally hoses
> > our DSL link for anything else. Worse, even when she stops
> > it continues to run in the background. Also, it apparently
> > advertises so we get incoming connect requests. These are
> > blocked by the router but they still act like a denial
> > of service attack.
> > 
> > Does anyone have a way to live with this? (Short of removing
> > it entirely)
> > 
> > Richard Harke
> 
> I'd vote for removing it entirely.  Mozilla Thunderbird can do usenet.

Grabit looks like a tool specifically for leeching binaries from usenet --
something that most of the newsreaders meant for traditional text groups
aren't particularly good at.  So Thunderbird probably isn't a great
solution.

I've seen malware masquerade itself as grabit.exe.  Your wife may
be using Grabit, but it's also possible that there's something else
involved.  Make sure the grabit.exe that's running is the "real" one.  If
it's running from windows/system or system32, chances are it's not what it
seems.

In any case, it sounds like you need some traffic shaping.  Your router
might do it (not likely though, if it's one of the usual cheap home
"routers"), or it might support the installation of something like OpenWRT,
which does.  Dunno what kind of traffic shaping is available for windows
machines but *nix does it nicely :)  It looks like klibido and nzb are
similar apps to Grabit, although I have not used either.

-t