Sorting Completed and closed torrents from Active

Many torrent clients have the option to move completed files from one folder to another, but this does not help if the Downloads folder already have things in them. I also prefer to sort my downloads according to my own hierarchy not the names and folders that they were named in the torrent.

Therefore I am more concerend in moving the file to a completed folder when I have stopped downloading and seeding.

The following script which depends on having Aversa
find_completed_torrent.rb

There are a few folder hierarchy variables that need to be setup but then it could be used to move files which no longer have a torrent file referencing them into another folder.

rTorrent Manuall install

Manual Install of latest rtorrent (on ubuntu 8.04 )
Original (and incomplete) instructions from here (I also think that the /usr/local/ is not the correct place to be installing these things but I do not have a better choice)

First remove apt-get rtorrent install
$ sudo apt-get remove rtorrent
This will also remove some no longer needed dependencies

Install other dependancies (not too sure if these are really required but were mentioned in the original guide), Oddly enough not installed or removed by apt-get when installing rtorrent!
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libsigc++-2.0-dev pkg-config comerr-dev libcurl3-openssl-dev libidn11-dev libkadm55 libkrb5-dev libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libncurses5 libncurses5-dev

When I did this the latest versions were rtorrent 8.4/ libtorrent 12.4
$ cd /usr/local/
$ sudo wget http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/downloads/libtorrent-0.12.4.tar.gz
$ sudo wget http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/downloads/rtorrent-0.8.4.tar.gz

$ sudo tar xvf libtorrent-0.12.4.tar.gz
$ sudo tar xvf rtorrent-0.8.4.tar.gz

$ cd libtorrent-0.12.4
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

$ cd rtorrent-0.8.4
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

And where is it installed? taking a closer look at the readme's it should have put executables in /usr/bin.

$ sudo find / -name rtorrent
>/usr/local/rtorrent-0.8.4/src/rtorrent
The binary executable has been left in the source folder!

$ cd /usr/local/rtorrent-0.8.4
$ sudo cp src/rtorrent /usr/local/bin/
$ ll /usr/local/bin/
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 12168526 2008-12-31 10:13 rtorrent
$ which rtorrent
> /usr/local/bin/rtorrent
$ sudo ldconfig

Seems to be working ok, but getting some errors about my ~/.rtorrent.rc file containing invalid options.

Ubuntu, Monitoring broadband data usage.

As many ISP now have data limits (quotas), be it hard or soft. With Hard limits they cut you off once over your quota or switch over to billing you a lot per MB, with a soft limit they just slow down your access.

Virgin.net will take your bandwidth down to 50% or 25% of the amount you pay for depending on tarrif. This is triggered by down loading 500MB (depends on tariff) between the hours of 4pm and 9pm. once triggered the reduced BW will stay in place for 5 hours.
Also note that the 500MB is less than half a movie rented from itunes, which means that are destroying the apple movie rental business!

For an 8Mb (Mega-bit) broadband full speed is actually 640KB /s (Kilo-Bytes)
500MB / 0.64 = 781.25 Seconds =13Minutes

The reduced BW can be triggered in just over 13 Minutes!
My experience for there non-cable 8MB connection reduced BW is 10KB/s Which is way beyond what they claim to reduce your BW to.

because of this it is useful to keep track of the BW that you home network is using. this is easy to do (I guess) if you only have one computer but if you have multiple machines or live in a flat with flatmates then the BW measuring must be done at a central point. For me my mini-itx server uses about 90% of my bandwidth so just measuring this should be good enough.

For Ubuntu (from a terminal do)

$sudo apt-get update
$apt-cache search ethstatus
$sudo apt-get install ethstatus

launch with in a terminal by calling
$ethstatus

Just need to work out how to make it clear/keep daily/monthly totals.

--
NB : Added 01/12/2008
Just found the ADSL Managment page for my isp
http://www.virgin.net/allyours/faqs/trafficmanagement.shtml
--

Setting up an RSS with rTorrrent

So I though t that I would have a go at setting up an RSS feed to put torrent files in to a watch folder for rTorrent to pick up.

http://code.google.com/p/rssdler/ Is meant to be very good at this

The requiremnets are this program pyhton above 2.4 and mechanize.
for my ubuntu server.

$ mkdir ~/bin
$cd ~/bin
$wget http://rssdler.googlecode.com/files/rssdler-0.4.0a.tar.gz
Once that is finished
$python --version
>Python 2.5.2
So that is OK
$apt-cache search mechanize
>python-mechanize - stateful programmatic web browsing
$sudo apt-get install python-mechanize

Now Build rssdler
$cd ~/bin
$tar -xvzf rssdler-0.4.0a.tar.gz

Now erm check the instructions!
http://code.google.com/p/rssdler/wiki/InstallInstructions

Looks like this is also required
$sudo apt-get install python-feedparser

Make dir for runtime files
$mkdir ~/.rssdler

Install rssdler
$cd ~/bin/rssdler040
$sudo python setup.py install

now apparantely it will just work by calling
$rssdler -r

eek no config file found
$cd ~/.rssdler
copy the sampe config.txt from here http://code.google.com/p/rssdler/wiki/CommentedConfig

Still does needs some work before it will do something useful. Will update soon.
####
Update: got it working my config file with all the blotted comments removed.
$cd ~/.rssdler
$cat config.txt | grep -iv '#'
----
[global]
downloadDir = /mnt/starbug1/terra1/samba/10-test/
workingDir = /home/morgy/.rssdler
log = 5
logFile = downloads.log
verbose = 5

scanMins = 2
runOnce = True
urllib = False

[testrss]
link = http://rss.thepiratebay.org/0
----

rtorrent Views

I just discover views in rtorrent. My favourite terminal torrent client.
Just pressing keys 1-7 will show different sorted/filtered lists of your torrents.

Original source http://linux.die.net/man/1/rtorrent

1: Main (sorted by name but new torrents are added to the bottom of the list)
2:Name (alphabetical I think)
3:Started (a filtered Name)
4:Stopped (a filtered Name)
5:Complete (a filtered Name)
6:Incomplete (a filtered Name)
7:Hashing (a filtered Name)

Screen CTRL-S Bug

When switching between terminals and text editors the occasional ctrl-s gets accidentally typed into the terminal. For along time I thought that this was a bug in screen but it is a standard terminal feature. Ctrl-s calls the software flow control method XOFF which stops the character flow to the terminal, which when you did not realise what you pressed just seems to freeze the terminal.

ctrl-q calls XON and starts the terminal again.

For a more permanent fix you can add this to your .bashrc (not sure how other shells are effected).

stty ixany

Which allows any character to call XON, so the character press is sent and displayed and you will never be aware of the terminal freezing.

If this does not work for you, or you also don't seem to be able to send ctrl-s ctrl-q commands to terminal applications you can use
stty stop undef To unmap ctrl-s
stty start undef To unmap ctrl-q

Or to stop XOFF and XON being sent from the keyboard but still allowing other software to send the commands use
stty ixoff -ixon
NB: ctrl-q can now be used to shutdown rtorrent

Screen tips

I am a big fan of screen for when working with terminals. When working with remote connections it is very handy if you require a new terminal do something and protects you against dropped connections. or if you start running a job that takes longer than expected, you can just disconnect and pick it up again later.

Just found this tip at
http://polishlinux.org/howtos/screen-tips-tricks/
Add this to ~/.screenrc
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string '%{= mK}%-Lw%{= KW}%50>%n%f* %t%{= mK}%+Lw%< %{= kG}%-=%D %d %M %Y %c:%s%{-}'
This gives a tab along the bottom of the open terminal (Screen Session).

also this line (from the same source) added to crontab
@reboot screen -S rtorrent -md /usr/bin/rtorrent
Will create new screen session (disconnected) and start the bit torrent program rtorrent.

To edit the crontab
$crontab -e

This page looks like a good crontab reference
http://mkaz.com/ref/unix_cron.html

My favourite terminal torrent client

I have been looking for a nicer terminal bit torrent client than bit tornado for a while and came across rtorrent. It has its own wikipedia page. I have found this torrent client to be much faster than the official version.

It is easily installed on Debian and Ubuntu systems with
$sudo apt-get install rtorrent

NB: if $apt-cache search rtorrent does not return any results you may need to add some thing to your sources list.

On OS X it is available once you have installed and setup Darwin ports.
$sudo port install rtorrent
Good tutorial here for getting it running