Life, The Universe And Everything

Hmm, I can smell that you are fired up, egged on by configuring your Modems. And so, FOTW,  I present to you, a guide on configuring your Torrent client. All Torrent clients have a window from which you can change various options. Open it by pointing your mouse to Options – Preferences. Or in most cases, press Ctrl – P. The most important options that we shall talk about are: Connection, Bandwith, Bittorrent, and Scheduling. Its a lot to read, but all points are important.

• Connection: You have to enable UPnP Port Mapping, NAT-PMP Port Mapping, and add to the windows firewall exception. Also you have to add an exception to your antivirus/firewall. The notable point here, is that the port number should be the same as you used while updating your iptables. Confused? Read this and this.

• Bandwith: This tab concerns with managing your bandwidth (speed, as many people call it). The maximum upload rate decides the upload rate of the client. If its the upload rate of individual torrents you want to change, right-click on the active torrent and do so from the properties. Same goes for the Maximum download rate. Global maximum number of connections mean the overall number of connections the client makes with other peers (connected computers). And maximum number of peers per torrent is also the same, except that its on a per torrent basis.
  eg. Global peers is 150, max peers is 100, and you have 2 torrents active. So the client will try to connect to 200 peers (2 x 100) but will be limited by global limit of 150.
  Remember that connecting to peers consumes significant amount of bandwidth. So, make sure that the global maximum number of connections and connection per torrent is proportional to the swarm of uploaders and downloaders.
  For a 2Mbps line, Global limit of 500 and per torrent limit of 200, with 3 torrents active is sufficient to give good speed.

• Bittorrent: This are basic features, It wont hurt if you enable all options like DHT, Local Peer Discovery, Scrape Information. But ensure that Protocol Encryption is enabled. Thats because, ISPs world-wide are aware of torrent data passing throught their networks, and hence everything they can to throttle it.

• Scheduler: Tired of waking up at odd times to avail free bandwidth? Can’t be at two places at once? Use the scheduler to automatically do it for you. If you followed all my instructions, all you need to do is set-up your scheduler according to your time schedules!
  
  Here, the green color means the client is active, it will download as well as upload without restriction on speed (i.e.  whatever is specified in the Bandwidth Tab). The light-green color says that upload will proceed according to the speed-limits (specified on the same page below the table, not in above picture).
  The above snap is from my client, and heres how it is organised. There are 24 horizontal boxes, one each for every hour of the day,starting from 0000 Hrs. Making that box (that hour) of your desired color, will cause the client to follow the mentioned action. So the above table means: My client is active from 2 AM to 8 AM, since boxes number 3 to 8 are greened.
  And if you need to download stuff in the daytime, just deselect the Enable Scheduler option.

So there you go, I have shared much of what I know, still if you need anything, just comment it.

In continuation of my previous post, I am putting up this guide to explain Port Forwarding. Note, this is something you should do only if you have done this. Also you will have to perform these given steps every time you turn on your UT Starcom UT300R2U ADSL Modem. Well who said speed comes easy ?

Here goes.

• Goto Start – Run, type into it “telnet 192.168.1.1″, without the quotes. It opens the command prompt, with the  following . For Linux users, type the same from terminal/konsole.BCM96338 ADSL Router
  Login:

  The login and password both are admin.

• Once it gives you the prompt (>_), paste the following lines. What it means is explained later.
  iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp --dport 8080 -i ppp_0_35_1 -j DNAT --to 192.168.1.11:8080
iptables -I FORWARD -p tcp -d 192.168.1.11 --dport 8080 -i ppp_0_35_1 -o br0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -I FORWARD -p tcp -s 192.168.1.11 --sport 8080 -i br0 -o ppp_0_35_1 -j ACCEPT
  The above three lines mean, a) Accept packets from any source to my computer, b) Send packets from my computer to any destination.

• Make sure of 3 things
  1. Here 192…11 is my IP address. Substitute yours in that place. eg 192.168.1.10
  2. 8080 is the port that I have specified in my torrent client to be forwarded. Change them so that both are the same.
  3. Dont be a Pirate !

• There maybe a problem though. It may happen that your IP address changes everytime you switch on your Modem. So int the Start – Run menu, type ipconfig and see your IP address. Accordingly make changes to the above three lines.

Happy S(p)eeding !

Okay, Ive been asked by a lot of friends and classmates, to help me configure their modem with Linux. So here goes. This is a guide for Starcom UT300R2U.

• Goto your browser and in the address bar, type in “192.168.1.1″ (without the quotes).

• In the login window that appears, type in “admin” (without the quotes) for the username and password. That’s right, both are the same.
  

  uid:admin; pwd:admin

• Now you will encounter a window, with various links in a pane on the left side, and a table giving some device information. Click Advanced Setup in the left pane and you will come across such a table.

• Click the Edit button on the first entry. According to your current configuration, the displayed table may differ by a few entries, but its inconsequential, because we are editing and making a new one.

• ATM PVC Configuration:  Enter the following: 0 in the VPI textbox and 35 in the VCI textbox. Disable the”Enable VLAN Tagging” checkbox. Service Category must be UBR without PCR.
  

  ATM/PVC config.

• Select the PPPoE radio button. Make sure encapsulation mode is as shown. Click Next.

• This step is pretty important. Make sure you enter the correct username and password provided by your ISP(in this case BSNL). Make sure you have ticked Dial on Demand. It means that your  modem (which is halfway into being a router) will dial out automatically when you switch it on.
  

The only shortcoming you may face, is not having a static IP on your LAN. Here is what you should do, assuming that the modem isn’t shared.  Goto Advanced Setup – LAN, and make the following changes.

Remember, if anything goes wrong, no need to pray to God, or send me swear messages, just press the holy RESET button at the back of the Modem !

My brother was forced to use GPRS because his USB CDMA modem broke So he enabled GPRS on my phone (his phone is a crappy Nokia) and borrowed it for his use. 

Then all he had to do was to pair up via Bluetooth on both the machines (Mac and GPRS enabled phone) and he was up and surfing in a few minutes (did I mention it took me around 15 hrs and 3 calls to Help center for getting GPRS enabled :X )

Now he treated himself to a new MOTORAZR V8 and enabled GPRS on his phone to return mine and I couldnt help but start  (unfairly) comparing between MOTORAZR V8 and MOTOSLVR L9. 

More on that after I turn the V8 inside out and compare!

I installed GTalk 1.0.0.104 today, upon enabling GPRS and had Winamp 5.54 installed earlier.So I was in for a shock (which I had suffered earlier, but was expecting it to be solved) when I set my status message to “Currently playing Music Track”.

GTalk just hangs up, and consumes almost all CPU!But fear not! 

The mandarins of technology (or should I say Geekville) found a workaround : All you need to do is create an empty playlist in your Winamp install folder (usually in the “/Program Files/Winamp” folder) and voila!! 

And all is well in Geekville!

This thread helped me out!

I just started learning Ruby, with a lot of egging by my brother. And these are my first baby steps in the world of Ruby

puts "Hello, World!"

Yup, that is a Hello World code in Ruby. No main methods, semi-colons, or returns.
Ruby is a type-less, dynamically typed language.

Duck-typing As coined by Alex Martelli : “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I would call it a duck.”

We are more concerned with the aspects and methods of the object than the type of the objects. In Ruby, I will create a function, and accept an object and send messages to it. If that object does not have the above methods, then a run-time error will occur.

Nice Huh?

openSuse is a godsend! All hail openSuse!! I was always bombarded with a question that all would-be linux enthusiasts always ask:”To install Linux, do i boot in M$Windows and pop in the CD?” They did not know about the F9 or even the BIOS key! Upto now my answer would have been a big disappointing NO! I used to start with the BIOS and then go on to explain about partitioning. Not any longer. You just pop in the CD while working in windows, do your stuff, reboot, and Voila! you boot straight into the Suse install. No partioning needed (for newbies), just like windows, but better looking plus you get to install what you want from the huge database in the DVD!

What they’ve basically done is make an initrd on the primary partition.

The initial ramdisk, or initrd is a temporary file system used by the Linux kernel during boot and is basically used for making preparations before the real root file system can be mounted. In the initrd system, files to be accessed by the kernel at boot-time are stored on a ramdisk, whose contents are found in a filesystem which has been made on a loop mounted file. The location of this initial ramdisk (initrd) is provided to kernel by a boot loader.Click Here for more on initrd.

It had all the newbies in my coll clamouring up for more. In essence, the guys at openSuse have sounded the death knell for Install Fests. Takes just under an hour for an uncustomised install.Will take an hour for customising partitions and packages.