Monday, January 30, 2012

BTGuard [Follow up]

Speeds did take a hit. Some torrents aren't as bad as others. I used their testing torrent ( which is really just ubuntu 10.04 iso) and the speeds maxed out my connection. But for my day-to-day downloading, speeds are cut about half. Some torrents were especially hit. Whereas I was getting 100k-200k/s before, I'd be lucky to get into 60k/s with BTGuard.

Usually this isn't such a big deal. For the average 350MB file, this means that it takes 20 minutes instead of 10 minutes. But if you're downloading something closer to the 8GB to 20GB range, then this could be a significant increase in how long you're in the swarm.

I haven't quite decided if BTGuard is worth it. I was originally getting it so that I could get the bigger torrents without worrying about having to be in the swarm for a long time, unprotected. But if BTGuard's speeds are so slow that I end up being in the swarm 2x-3x longer, then the protection its proxies give me may not be worth it.

Friday, January 27, 2012

BTGuard

Started subscribing to BTGuard. All the recent privacy and idiocy with what Congress and the House are trying to do with the internet has annoyed me enough in order to pay for anonymisation. I'm not going to say what I download, but I figured its worth the $6 a month for other people not to know either.

So far its worked decently. The speed is slower than I'm used to. On torrents that used to scream by at 1.1MB/s, now plod along at 300-400 KB/s. Still fast, but there certainly is a hit. With it being more anonymous, I'm not as worried about keeping it on longer.

We'll see if I keep it going after this month.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

utserver and webmin

Found something interesting when trying to install webmin on the ubuntu server.
I recently installed utserver ( uTorrent Linux Alpha Server). Apparently, regardless of what port you specify it uses for the webui, it will also bind and use port 10000. This is a problem because webmin likes port 10000 and will not install if it is already taken.

From the utorrent support forums. The way around it is to shut down utserver ( thus freeing port 10000). Then install webmin. After that, re-run utserver. utServer will find that port 10000 is taken and then will choose a pre-defined alternate port.

The reasoning why utserver needs another port in the first place had something to do with device pairing. To be honest I didn't pay attention because it didn't involve anything I was doing.