Torrentfun with TorrentFlux
Mar 21
Damn, It looks like it is (once again) beginning to be a computer-packed week full of stuff to do and problems to solve. What I thought to be another week of semi-downtime when it comes to the silicon side, is turning into another binary bitstorm that never keeps me far away from the keyboard. Visitor numbers on Knightwise.com are up (somehow the MSN messenger story is pulling a lot of interest) but I have an inkling that this could be related to porn-surfers gone astray. Since I put myself on Twitter yesterday I have had a steady amount of friends adding me to their list. I must however disappoint them that I have not had a lot of time to post on Twitter cause I haven't been around a (twitter friendly) computer. Yesterday I did however find (thanx to Dave) an IM client for my Treo that hopefully will be able to fix that. That way I can post from my Treo. But enough banter, on with the story.
I wrote about this Old G3 Bondy blue Mac that I have some time ago. I got it as a present and when I got it, it was not working anymore. I fixed the power supply and got it up and running, only to find out that, even with maxing out the ram to 512 meg, I could not run OSX on it. Even with the expert help of Tuke, my local Mac Guru we could not get the tiger into the Mac. What to do ? Well , there is always Linux ! Tried Yellow Dog linux, but did not care for that much, but when I saw the server version of Ubuntu being available for the PPC I just had to try it. Installing it was a breeze and before I knew I had an entire LAMP server up and running on the machine. With Apache, Mysql and PHP at the tip of my fingers (and saving me a LOT of manual configuration work) the little bugger was a nice addition to the pack and offered to be a great test server. I even installed XFCE on it using the simple command found at ubuntuguide.org. Before I knew it i had a pretty functional super light ultra pretty mail/internet computer that had severpower under the hood.
So Sunday, as me and Captain Command Line where chatting away on Skype, I asked him about TORRENTFLUX which is a web-based bittorrent client that you can run on an old Linux box. What it is is a full fledged bittorrent client, but instead of being a client that runs on a graphical interface (like azereus runs on gnome, kde or windows) Torrentflux is a web based interface that uses APACHE and MYPHP to do its thing. So I popped port 80 and port 22 to open to the server and asked Captain Command line if he could help me out. Pretty soon I heard the little machine rattle and roll as the SSH tunnel from Hull to Hasselt did its thing. (coming to think of it , its quite amazing actually). Being the genius that he is, he managed to pull it of in about 15 minutes (it would have taken me at least an hour). So i took my webbrowser to the IP of my little G3 and was amazed to see Torrentflux waiting for me. I logged in (of course there has to be some security) and could choose to either upload my own torrentseed, enter the url of a seed (one on publicdomaintorrents.com for example) or use the build in torrent-search engine to look for content that I needed. When the seed was ready all I had to do is start the torrent and torrentflux would start downloading the seed to the G3. Even more cool is that you can download the file you just "pulled in" using bittorrent with a web interface. So just surf over to Torrentflux, click on the link of the completed file, download it to your local machine and (via the web interface) delete it on the machine.
For me it was a perfect solution. This is a "server functionality" that I love ! There is a lot of legal content being spread via bittorrent and instead of having a computer on with a torrent client all the time, i can now rely on my G3 and Torrentflux to rattle away as I give the order. From anywhere in the world ! Using just a browser. So together with my Email, my PVR – programming software and my website software.. my entire bittorrent needs have been met using just a browser ! Fan Tas Tic !
Here is a nice how to
