It’s funny, because it’s true :/

I’ve been running torrents on my server for quite a while now. I used to run Azureus on my desktop, but because it’s Java-based, it was quite heavy on memory.

To run torrents on my server I used Torrentflux. It’s a PHP-webinterface to BitTornado and it has a nice community and forum where they regularly post hacks to add new features. After a while I found out there was a different version (fork) of Torrentflux with more features and I switched.

TF-B4rt

This fork of Torrentflux is called Torrentflux-b4rt. It adds a bunch of new features, including some improvements to the interface and support for multiple bittorrent clients. TF-b4rt supports BitTornado, Mainline, Transmission and Azureus.
Azureus support is provided through a piece of middleman software called Fluazu, which talks in XML to Azureus. This (and being written in Python) causes Fluazu to use quite a bit of CPU cycles. About 10-30% on my 2.13Ghz Core2Duo server. It’s also a rather delicate system, if you manually delete a torrent through the Azureus-GUI/console, or disk, the webinterface starts to bug. It will show torrents running that aren’t, and you can’t delete them because it’s convinced they’re still active. But even if I didn’t do something like that, Fluazu got confused with my torrents.

The main reason I wanted to use Azureus (and thus, Fluazu), is the support for global download/upload rate-limits. However, the extra CPU usage for Fluazu was bothering me and I looked for alternatives.

Azureus Web Interface

Azureus has it’s own web interface. Two actually. The HTML Web-UI, and the Swing Web-UI. I tried the Swing Web-UI and it works rather well. You upload torrents, Azureus downloads them. Because it talks directly to Azureus it’s more reliable than Torrentflux-Fluazu.

Installing the Swing Web-UI breaks support for TF-B4rt/Fluazu.

Clutch

Another webinterface is called Clutch. It’s a webinterface that talks to the Tranmisson daemon. Transmission is a fast light-weight torrent client. Using the daemon version, you can have multiple uploads with a global upload/download limit.

After loading about 20 torrents in Transmission, I was using about 1% memory, while Azureus used 9.5%. CPU usage for Azureus was 2-4%, while Transmission rarely got above 1%.

Torrentflux-b4rt provides the most functuonality. It has some features you can’t find in the other two. For example you can enter RSS-feeds for torrents that get downloaded automatically and you can upload multiple files at a time. Also you can stop/start/delete all torrents and data at once. It also supports multiple users, multiple torrent-clients and has more extensive statistics. Because of all these extra feature, Torrentflux is also used in hosted solutions.

Unfortunately it doesn’t support global upload/download limits on its own. It needs the Fluazu/Azureus combination for this. And using this combination is rather CPU intensive. So all in all, Torrentflux-b4rt is a great solution if you don’t need the global upload/download limits.

The Azureus Web Interface is very nice if you’re a single user. The Azureus bittorrent client has a lot of features so having a web interface to this powerful client is great. It’s quite a bit more resource intensive compared to BitTornado or Transmission, but it does feature advanced features like the distributed tracker, which allows you to download torrents of which the original tracker is down.

Transmission+Clutch has a very clean interface and turned out to be the best choice for me. It doesn’t have all the advanced features of Torrentflux, but it does the basics just right. It requires few resources, allows you to set global upload/download rates and it has a feature to start/stop all torrents at once.

The second part of the Christmas gift from Razer is the Razer Piranha

The Piranha is Razer’s second attempt to create a gaming headset. You can read what I thought of their first attempt here.

First impressions

The Piranha looks like a typical headset. On-ear cups, flexible mic-boom and an adjustable headband. The Sennheiser PC150 follows the exact same recipe.

An obvious difference (at least in the dark) is the glowing Razer logo. To power these LEDs the Piranha has a small USB plug. This plug is not used for anything else, so if you don’t like the blue LEDs, simply unplug the USB connector.

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I recently received this mouse as part of a christmas-gift from Razer, and I’ve decided to write a review about. In my opinion most hardware sites don’t have proper mouse-reviews. They either don’t know what they’re talking about, or are afraid they won’t receive any more review samples if they’re too critical. One notable exception is ESReality.

I think I do know what I’m talking about, and I don’t get review samples anyway

You might have read my review of the Razer Barracuda headphone/soundcard combo, if you did, you’ll know I might be a fan of Razer, but not a fanboy.

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Going to a normal LAN party with some friends is nice. But since most LAN parties are held in big halls without proper beds and showers, you normally end up sleep-deprived and smelling like cheese.

During the summer my trusted gang of geeks and I head out to Campzone. A great outdoor LAN party (in tents/caravans), that lasts for 11 days. You bring your own bed, take a shower every now and then, but you still end op sleep-deprived and smelling like cheese.

That’s why during the cold winter months, that same gang of geeks and I go to Relaxion. Relaxion is an indoor LAN party, but with an interesting twist. It’s held in vacation homes. During the low-season, these vacation homes are relatively affordable. So the Relaxion crew books about 10 of these vacation homes. A bunch for an entire week, and the rest for a weekend.

This year was the third time we went to Relaxion, and again, we went for a weekend. The vacation homes have real beds, showers and a bath. A pleasant change from the big halls and concrete floors of normal LAN parties. After 2,5 days of gaming you end up relaxed and refreshed!

I made some snapshots and another gang of geeks made a video about Relaxion.

My previous post about getting the temperatures of disks connected to an Areca raid array already noted that MRTG can only handle two datasources in a single graph.

With 5 disks in a system, this would force me to create 3 graphs, or 1 graph with the temperatures of the 4 disks connected to the RAID array averaged into a single line.

I’ve always wanted to move from MRTG to RRDtool, because RRDtool can handle multiple datasources per graph, and has more options.

However, I found RRDtool very hard to configure compared to MRTG. So I went looking for an alternative.

Cacti is a front-end for RRDtool, which makes it easier to create nice graphs. If you just want to graph routers, it’s even easier to configure than MRTG. But if you like to have custom stats, like the Areca HDD temperatures, it takes a little more work.
Cacti has some nice guides on how to create graphs and new input methods on their site, but even with those it took me quite some time to create my first graph.

By now I’ve migrated all my graphs from my personal MRTG page to Cacti

I’ve been running my Areca RAID array for a few months now and I’m very pleased with it. The only thing that was bothering me was the lack of MRTG graphs for the attached disks.
The disk temperature is an important thing to monitor, because as Google pointed out, a high disk temperature has a significant effect on drive failure.

Areca has made some excellent tools available to monitor your array and attached disks. For example, Areca’s web interface can show you all the disk temperatures.

In Areca’s web interface you have total control over your RAID array. You can add/remove disks, create new arrays and do a check on existing arrays.

But it’s annoying to have to log in to this web interface just to check the temperatures of the disks. Also, it doesn’t come with nice graphs and history information. It just shows the current temperatures.

Areca has also made a CLI utility. Using this utility you can do the same things as in the web interface. I’ve used the CLI utility to generate the data needed by MRTG. MRTG can only handle 2 datasources in one graph. Having 5 disks total (1 bootdisk, 4 RAID member disks), I would need 3 graphs to monitor the disks. So I decided to create a little BASH script that would take the temperature of the bootdisk, and the average temperature of the 4 RAID disks and feed this to MRTG.

It happened again. I told a friend I’d never get a UPS because they’re way too expensive, and now I’ve got a nice APC SmartUPS 1500 sitting on top of my server.

I got it for 150€ on a LAN party. It has fresh batteries which should be able to power the server for 80 minutes before it gently shuts it down.

The LAN party I was on is called Campzone it’s an 11-day outdoor LAN-party in tents and caravans. People bring all kinds of high power devices to this LAN. Like deep fryers, toasters, fridges and ovens. This can cause the power to fail and during the two small power outages, the UPS performed perfectly.

The reason I got a UPS is because of the hardware RAID array in my server. It’s an Areca 1210 with 256MB cache. To safely enable disk write caching you need to make sure the power never fails unexpectedly. Else the data in the write buffer will get lost.

There are two options to ensure the Areca’s buffer doesn’t lose power. The first is a small BBU (Battery Backup Unit) which you can buy for about 90€. The second options is a UPS.

So when I saw the UPS for 150€, I thought this would make a good excuse to get one.

APC Smart UPS 1500, rear

APC Smart UPS 1500, hot swappable batteries