Simple Little Usenet Test (S.L.U.T.)
a tool for verifying your newsgroup server parameters
Simple Little Usenet Test (SLUT) is a tool for testing and verifying your account settings for a usenet (newsgroup) server. It's a very simple program, all you do is enter the news server name, as well as your account settings (user name and password), and the software will connect to the newsgroup server and perform a series of test operations to verify that you are able to log on to the server, select newsgroups, download headers and messages, etc.
SLUT is designed to be a tool to help you if there is a problem accessing your news server. It displays a verbose list of diagnostic messages that may help you to determine the cause of any problems that you might be having.
Click HERE to download Simple Little Usenet Test
The current version is 0.3, released 12-28-2005. This software runs under the Windows operating system (Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP). This software does NOT contain any adware or spyware. This software is distributed as a freeware application and is free for noncommercial use.
Click HERE to read the user's manual
The user's manual describes the operation of the program.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and so here is a screen shot of the program in operation, so you can see how it connects to and verifies the operation of a usenet news server:
To the left you can see the main window of the program. There are three fields that you need to enter (News Server Name, User Name, and Password). Then you just hit the <Start Test> button and away it goes. The green checkmarks in the "test progress" section indicate that everything went well.
The "status messages" box can be used to diagnose problems with the connection, and figure out what went wrong, in the case that something does go wrong.
You can select other groups than alt.test, for example use one of the alt.binaries group to verify that your server is allowing access to the binary newsgroups.
