I build a small wiring closet in an empty closet in my house with my modem and router. I plan to also put a small machine to download torrents for me to.
The specs will most likely be crap I have in my basement:
Pentium III ~450Mhz and matching ASUS motherboard. Probably very little RAM, assume a single stick of 128mb. Generic video card, not even sure if it will be AGP. I'm probably going to have to buy a small harddrive around 20-40Gb. The machine won't have much cooling since it'll need to be quiet.
The features I'd like are webserver and torrent client+web interface. I want the most lightweight OS and software.
What are you suggestings?
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Anonymous2006-03-29 23:59
Um...maybe I didn't catch all that.
You want to use this to download torrents, yet you only have a 20-40 gig hard drive? Hope you're only downloading small files.
Also, if it's going to be on all the time, like I would imagine a server / torrent machine to be, I wouldn't think little cooling would be smart. I'm not an expert, but it just doesn't sound right.
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Anonymous2006-03-30 0:09
20-40Gb is enough. Stuff doesnt have to stay there. There are other machines on the network. There just has to be room while the torrents are in progress.
As for cooling, I am going to either run an open case or use 120mm fans at 5V instead of 12V. There will only be the CPU and an old hard drive. No modern GPU or fast chipsets to make heat.
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Anonymous2006-03-30 1:26
Ah, makes sense then.
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Anonymous2006-03-30 1:36
So, I still need OS/software suggestions.
Currently, I'm thinking of a Debian install but I am not familiar with Linux torrent clients.
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Anonymous2006-03-30 1:58
jsut install windblows xp or whatever you have. wont matter.
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Anonymous2006-03-30 2:10
>>6
Use XP on a slow machine with no memory and then try to run 2-3 torrents?
Are you mad?
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Anonymous2006-03-30 2:27
I had a Debian3r0 machine with a K6-2/300 processor, 64MB of RAM, and a 40GB + 8GB drives (the 8GB being the downloading area). It was a headless box (ssh into the machine from a laptop to run screen + multiple btlaunchmanycurses) I used to jack into the University network and download at ~4MB/sec for most of the evening during the Anime club screenings.
The only real performance engineering was running some of the torrents to the 8GB drive (on the second IDE controller) when the torrent hammering (@ 4MB/s...) got a bit much.
I'd expect a machine of half the specs of the K6-2 will be able to handle a broadband connection with ease..
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Anonymous2006-03-30 2:35
>>8
It's nice to know that the machine should perform well enough though.
Are there any good lightweight BT clients that have a web interface. I'd prefer to do everything via HTTP (just preference really).
I had a little old box with 128MB ram, 450mhz cpu, and a 4GB and a 40GB hd in it. I ran torrents on to it all the time and it never had any issues. I was running Windows 2003 server enterprise ed. and it ran absolutely fine. the most useful bit was that I had complete control from my laptop using the Remote Desktop Connection. looking at the setup you're considering, you should be able to run 2003 just fine.
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Anonymous2006-03-30 2:58
>>11
I have another machine that isn't on 24/7. On it I have XP, IIS, and Azureus with the web interface plugin. It works well using the HTTP interface, but RDP is very slow and unresponsive.
I just want a small linux machine with Apache and BT. I just don't know what BT client to use. Mostly I want it to use Debian since I think I may end up running some other services on it.
>>10
I need a commandline app since I won't be installing any window sytem on the computer. Just a basic Debian netinst.
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Anonymous2006-03-30 3:35
Use Gentoo, lighttpd, and rTorrent.
rTorrent has some kind of interface where you can drop torrents in a directory and it will pick them up, write a quick Perl interface for uploading, or use Samba. You could even put the torrents on your local computer and rTorrent will pick them up when you put them there, I guess.
If you need more web interface thingies... rTorrent is open source ;) And it might have something built in already, I don't know.
Apache is a memory hog and not made for single-user use.
Gentoo won't take very long to compile on that beast of a machine.
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Anonymous2006-03-30 3:48
Gentoo won't take very long to compile on that beast of a machine.
I hope compiling includes at leat -O3 -march=pentium2 -malign-double -funroll-loops -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer and -fstrict-aliasing . These are just basic.
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Anonymous2006-03-30 4:20
>>13
I tried Gentoo once and couldn't figure it out. I'm not a programmer and I haven't the slightest idea what each of the CFLAGS do. I got tired and stuck to simple Debian with apt.
Also, I don't just want to put torrents in a folder and have them run automatically. I want a decent web interface that shows me completion, peers, status messages and simple controls. If you even used the HTTP interface for Azureus thats good enough.
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Anonymous2006-03-30 4:23
>>13 >>14
I was just double checking the docs on gentoo.org
Did I read correctly when it said there was a menu based installer that let you setup stuff and it will compile automatically?
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Anonymous2006-03-30 4:35
>>15 I tried Gentoo once and couldn't figure it out. I'm not a programmer and I haven't the slightest idea what each of the CFLAGS do.
They make your system cooler; think Freezer's transformations. -Ox is the level of transformation, 3 is the slick final one, and the rest are to cheer him up.
>>16 Did I read correctly when it said there was a menu based installer that let you setup stuff and it will compile automatically?
It's no fun if you don't do it by hand.
VROOM VROOOM!
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Anonymous2006-03-30 4:38
>>17
I can't find any plugins for rTorrent so it seems unlikely I can find a web interface
Is there a way to get PHP to send/receive text from the terminal rTOrrent is running from?
btlaunchmanycurses, which is a part of the standard BitTorrent code, automatically adds torrents copied to its working directory.
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Anonymous2006-03-30 15:12
>>23
But does it remove them when you move the completed file, huh punk?
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Anonymous2006-03-30 16:58
>>21 >>22 >>23 >>24
I already said futher up I want an iteractive interface, not just a drop torrents in place interface. Like the Azurues web interface.
Has anyone ever used TorretFlux before?
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Anonymous2006-03-30 19:08
>>25
SSH in and you'll get the interactive rTorrent interface ;)
Use a key and a cache to cut down on password entries.
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Anonymous2006-03-30 20:03
>>24
You would move the .torrent file out first. Then the files downloaded.
btlaunchmanycurses.py scans the directory for the .torrent files. If it finds one, it begins the download/upload.
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Anonymous2006-03-30 20:15
>>26
Again, I really would prefer a HTTP interface so I don't need a copy of PuTTY whenever I wan't to use it.
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Anonymous2006-03-30 21:02
>>25
well, I made my suggestion at >>11
you can use azureus if you do that.
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Anonymous2006-03-30 22:59
>>29
That system will be very slow. Azureus is a memory hog.
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Anonymous2006-03-31 0:15
Since when did "interactive" == "uses a mouse" ?
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Anonymous2006-03-31 0:49
>>30
it always worked perfectly fine for me. maybe you're just too used to your superfast Athlon/Pentium4