Cool stuff to do with your iburst

[rush]

Theres a ton of cool stuff that one can do with any internet connection.

But for those that have downloaded their fill of movies and p2p stuff you can start off by learning a few tricks that always helps you in some way or another.


I'll explain my setup at home and offer to help people with theirs should they wish to get something similar running.


I have 2 machines running


1. a piii 700 acting as a server ( gateway / nat )

2. a Piv Pentium M notebook which I use for b asically everything else.

The server runs linux. why? well we wont get into that here for there is the whole "I joos linux cos I are can like to be l337er than yuo" thing that I wish to avoid. One thing I'll say is that I dual boot with windows and linux on the notebook and I dont recall ever getting a worm or a virus on my windows machine because its behind my server. Never.

I can also log into my server remotely.

IE I am bored at work and want to do some administration on my machine at home? fire up a trusty ssh application like secureshell ( www.ssh.com )
and I'm on my server configuring a new kernel or whatever.

My server is also configured with squid ( a proxy )
now its not a proxy as in the conventional gateway type proxy, but rather a web cache proxy which keep a configurable amount of cached web pages to allow for quicker browsing. helping to preserve that prescious 3 gig cap thats soon on its way.

another cool use for the server is that I use it for my torrents.

So lets say I am bored at work again ( not to make it sound like I dont have enough to do at work , in fact I do but lets just say )

And I go off surging the onternot for a cool torrent or 2

In the event that I find one that I wish to download I simply do the following:

I ssh back into my machine at home, fire up a text browser called elinks (for those in the know its much like lynx or links2 but with decent cookie support and it even has mouse support )

And I use that browser to browse and download said torrent. Why? Why not email the torrent home or scp it across?

because if I download it from my home ip, the tracker knows all about it and can successfully track it.

Now heres the cool bit.

I use a linux torrent app called azureus which auto starts any torrent for download that it finds in a specified folder ( anyone see where this is going? )

Once the torrent file is downloaded. I move it to the watched folder that azureus is set to watch and it starts downloading it. so by the time I get home said movie or episode is ready for unpacking and watching.

Thats it for this week.

Tune in next week for more fun with your iburst.

 

[ic]

Nice thread, just wondering what distro(s) you prefer - pros & cons?
(maybe the subject of a not too futuristic post?)

 

[rush]

Distros of choice

debian - too 'weird' just dont like it
red hat/fedora - too windows like in the sense that its hardly a linux distro anymore, click click click and you got linux running AND with way too many processes starting up that could be bad for your health
slackware - dont know it well enough to comment, as with SUSE
Ubuntu - too local
Impi - too "wannabe a linux distro"
gentoo is my weapon of choice simply because I like to know whats going on from the ground up. Its probably the most difficult of all the linux's to install but at least the installation process in itself is a huge learning curve.

soon we'll have zanux which will have some awesome never seen features like the ability to download packages from peers ala torrent style and not from a mirror although there will be mirror for it you'll be able to grab bits from peers around you. As well as a manual install process or an auto configured process that will partition and allocate space for you based on what the livecd finds.
Zanux is still probably a year away from being a decent beta though cos the developer is somewhat "lazy" and yes thats his nick.

But these are pretty much desktops. even though I use gentoo as a desktop and a server, freebsd is way better suited to be a server.

 

[slimothy]

nice nice, this is my stretegy because torrent speeds suck.

I have access to root shells on 100mbit servers, with the closest being in NL and Germany so I have a php bash script that runs on the remote servers and it reads good torrent sites RSS feeds and automatically downloads new torrents, it then checks if words in the torrent name match up with any special words i set previously.. if it does it automatically starts a command line bittorrent client called ctorrent and downloads the file for me and seeds it for an extra 2 hours when its done. It then moves the file to a directory with all completed downloads. I then have a cronjob on my home pc which runs every 3 hours and checks for any new files in the remote servers 'done' directory. If there are some, it downloads em one at a time at a cool 120 KBps+. No crappy torrent speeds and my share ratio on torrent sites stays nice and high.

 

[bb_matt]

What kicks all this in the head is of course the cap, but it's a good idea anyway.

I haven't really bothered much with trying to hook up from work to home - no real point to be honest. It's easy enough to NAT a few ports via smoothwall, which I experimented with, but I can't afford to download torrent files on a 3gig cap, have my own hosting space and use a USB pen to transfer files here and there. I also disconnect my ADSL connection when not using it, to save every single byte I can.

In terms of Linux distributions, heck, I've tried a lot of them but always keep my trusty second PC with Slackware, custom kernel, dropline gnome etc.
I dual-boot my windows PC to try out new distributions - I tried Ubuntu but really didn't like it. Mandrake 10.1 = overkill. Debian I tried a while back, but to me, slackware is more powerful and I'm very familiar with it.
Redhat I lost interest in when it became Fedora - with a name so silly, I can't take it seriously

Must admit, I only use desktop linux every other day - windows is still streets ahead in terms of the applications I use, so I don't see much point with desktop linux until multimedia apps of the quality of photoshop, flash or dreamweaver are available in native format. If I were a programmer, I'm sure I'd have a different perspective.

For a server, I won't use anything else but Linux.
I also love those mini Linux distro's like Geexbox !
http://www.geexbox.org/en/index.html

 

[ic]

In terms of firewall distros, again pros & cons?

I'm still a Linux n00b, but I have been playing around with Cyote Linux, Devil Linux, and when I get into the admin web setup interface SmoothWall Express 2. So far SWe2 holds the most promise in terms of usability/maintenance.

 

[slimothy]

gimp is pretty much as good as photoshop. and there are plenty of good wysiwyg html apps on linux too. having said that though I do still use photoshop more than gimp

 

[lewstherin]

Personally I dig the Knoppix distros...especially the whole "boot and run" off CD side...pretty kewl...

 

[alchamy]

Firstly, Welcome to MyADSL rush, nice to see you posting on a forum other than your own

Yeah, I use a linux box for a similar purpose. Its easily managed from remote locations. And ofcourse when I am sitting having coffee & a smoke outside and the connection dies I can get it back up using Putty

ic, I would recommend Mitel SME for early linux days, its lightweight, simple, & just as powerfull as anything else. The added bonus of web configuration is also great when bash still looks like its another language.

Its runs on anything, a p2 with 128mb or ram will be plenty.

 

[ic]

...
ic, I would recommend Mitel SME for early linux days, its lightweight, simple, & just as powerfull as anything else. The added bonus of web configuration is also great when bash still looks like its another language.

Ok, that's something related to e-smith isn't it? If I can get it downloaded before the infamous bandwidth guillotine kicks in, I will try it in a virtual machine.

 

[Ravilj]

I am new to linux, started with Red Hat which has got to be the most illogical distro ever. Than i tried gentoo, even though there is no Graphical interface (that I know of) but there is a most comprehensive handbook that guides you through it.

As Rush said you are completely incontrol from the beginning up and thats also why I like it. You know exactly whats going on where everything is. The learning curve is exponential but it gives you an understanding of how linux works and runs.

Gentoo Linux: 1
Red Hat Linux: -1

 

[bb_matt]

gimp is pretty much as good as photoshop. and there are plenty of good wysiwyg html apps on linux too. having said that though I do still use photoshop more than gimp

* cough * choke * blink * yipes *

Ok, I almost fell over and died, but yes, for an average user not doing industry standard design work, sure, you can get away with OS alternatives. In fact, many tech websites and low cost brochures can too, but in the real design biz, hey - no way !

Photoshop is streets ahead of Gimp - it's entire UI, customer base, industry standard base and rabid user base is testament to that. Gimp is great, but it's more comparable to PSP

wysiwyg HTML apps for Linux ? - where ? - please lead me to the one that can offer what Dreamweaver can and I'll be VERY happy !
Again, it depends what you need the app for. If your maintaining one or two sites, hey, who needs dreamweaver ? If your maintaining 20 - well, ok then.

I know where your coming from slimothy, but my firm belief is that while Open Source has it's place, it won't ever replace commercial software development. Rather, the two should co-exist.

A commercial product like Photoshop or Dreamweaver have SO much depth of use behind thier user friendly GUI's it's quite scary.

An Open Source product like Gimp has depth too, but until the design industry adopts it, it can never progress into a tool good enough for a pro-designer.

I'll go and contradict myself here in the hope that the Open Source community CAN develop applications to rival the core features of Closed Source applications, but then, how would software developers make money ?

 

[Mercury]

Again, it depends what you need the app for. If your maintaining one or two sites, hey, who needs dreamweaver ? If your maintaining 20 - well, ok then.

Quanta Plus gets good reviews. May not be what you are looking for but others may find it useful. I do for my three sites.

 

[alchamy]

Ok, that's something related to e-smith isn't it? If I can get it downloaded before the infamous bandwidth guillotine kicks in, I will try it in a virtual machine.

Yeah its E-smith, very decent. My distro of choice for server work. Grab it at http://contribs.org

 

[slimothy]

actually I'm not some retard that maintains some crappy blog, so I don't think my opinions should be completly dismissed.

Yes photoshop is good, and yes it is the standard and as far as raster images go it is still king.

dreamweaver, however, is crap. If you wanna make something like myadsl.co.za, then sure, add a couple tables and images and you're done.. however on our sites the designers end up writing the CSS by hand and the actuall page content is just echo'd into <div>'s with unique IDs and the CSS controls everything. Yes this can be done with dreamweaver but but as I was told by Ming Chen our head designer, dreamweaver takes too much control and if he uses it he just ends up in the source view editing like he would with something like notepad most of the time. Anyways dreamweavers wysiwyg functionality is pretty much limited to your average PC browser but we want to create style sheets for PDA's, webTV, symbian phones etc etc and control the position of content through a custom content managment system, so for a linux open source replacement for dreamweaver... how about vi(m).

 

[ic]

Interesting, but I decided to opt for an xml approach, I generate all my CSS from xml (I created an xsd schema & instance data files for CSS info), I then have a VC++ project with custom build steps & when I do a rebuild/make all CSS & xhtml files get generated for each xml source file in the project.

 

[slimothy]

you mean you don't use dreamweaver?????!?!?

well shock horror *blink* *blink* *fall off chair* *get back in chair* *blink some more*

well thats just not teh leet

 

[ic]

What good is DreamWeaver to an insomniac?

Seriously though, I'm a control freak & I don't like utils that diminish my control, or have a mind of their own - IMO FrontPage has to be one of the worst monstrosities (apart from M$' other brain-child M$ Word that spews out junky/bloated & non-conformant html files).

Anyhow I have digressed into an o/t rant

 

[rush]

imagine this thread wasnt hijacked and torn asunder.

I forgot what it was originally about

 

[ic]

...
Thats it for this week.

Tune in next week for more fun with your iburst.

Rush, this is all merely idle chatter, we are eagerly awaiting your next installment