Download Torrents With Your PC Turned Off

Mr.Tweak writes to tell us that they have a review posted of a new wireless router from ASUS. What sets this router apart from others is that in addition to being a wireless router/gateway is that it also functions as a thin client system with a pre-installed 160 GB IDE drive (no SATA support sorry) and three USB 2.0 ports for peripherals. If you happen to use one of those USB ports for another drive the router will also support RAID 0 and 1, quite a bit more than the average router.

Where is TheTorrent?

[junglee_iitk]

What's with not using the word torrent in the whole summary?

Here is the part of the article:
"Applications lets you enable/disable the router's inbuilt applications - Download Master, Download Daemon, Download Share, Photo Album and Media Server, as well as do some basic configuration like specifying the port range and default seeding time for the BitTorrent client, and the default web server port. You can also configure the settings for an attached USB webcam, enabling to run via a web interface, and even turning it into a security camera controlled by the router, which can enable motion detection and email alerts. And finally, locally-attached USB printers can be configured and shared out - ready for connection from UPnP-enabled clients."

And here is the link :)
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/939/5/page_5_syst em_features_configuration/index.html [tweaktown.com]

Re:Great

[Pete Brubaker]

Well, I know it's a pain, but if you read the _whole_ article, it did say that it was shipped with Linux.

Raid over usb?

[Joe The Dragon]

That seem like a bad choice as usb has a lot of cpu over head firewire or e-sata wound of been better.

It also only has a basic BitTorrent client.

I wonder how it stands up under a full raid and bitTorrent load.

Re:Why not just use a computer?

[livewire98801]

$260 on newegg
linky [newegg.com]

Re:Security

[grolschie]

If you were downloading a file from bit torrent that contained a virus or spyware that affected the OS that shipped with the router, would that mean that not only your router, but every computer connected to that router would become infected?

Unlikely. If the router was running Windows XP and actually opened or ran the infected files that it downloads, then perhaps a virus might spread to other Windows XP clients on your network by exploiting some vulnerability. This would require firewalls to be turned off, security vulnerability to exist and be exploited, and a lack of up-to-date anti-virus software on your PCs. But since the router runs Linux, does not run the files, then no.

Re:Why not just use a computer?

[djrogers]

* a web server
* E-mail (SMTP, IMAP) server
* DNS server
* a file server (SMB, AFP) for internal (with a big hard drive)
* ssh access
* complete headless setup and configuration
* very small (Mac mini sized or smaller)
* maybe a print server
* wireless access point
* maybe VPN from the outside, or site-to-site tunnels
* some means to back the whole thing up (easily)

2 suggestions spring to mind - a KuroBox [kurobox.com] for about $150, or if you'd like it with a drive already installed, a Buffalo Linkstation [newegg.com] (newegg link) for just a few buck more. I have a 400GB Gig-E Linkstation that's currently running Debian (took all of 5 minutes to reflash it to deb), and it serves just about every purpose you list above except the WAP... It has 2 USB ports for external storage or printers (hmm, you could probably plug in a usb wifi adapter and get the WAP thing working too), it's very quiet, and is about the size of a mac mini.

Even without the debian re-flash, this box can do a lot of what you list above - it *is* a home server - but apt-get goodness just makes it that much more flexible.

Re:The perfect gift for a total cheapass.

[I kan Spl]

I'm sorry. I just have to reply to this.

I'm starting to look around in the market for a NAS box. I've been in contact with Buffalo about their Terastation, and I have pending e-mails with other companies. The Terastation uses 80 watts when fully powered. It is not perfect, however as it never spins down the drives even if they arn't being used.

My windows box for comparison uses somewhere around 180 watts when ideling with the drives on.

If I multiply 180*24*365 I get 1576 Kwh / year. 180 watts does not sound like much, but look at this quote:

"Starting in July 2001, new energy standards went into effect. Since that time all 15 cubic foot top-freezer refrigerator (with no through-the-door ice or water features) are required to have an energy rating of no more than 450 kilowatt-hours per year, a similarly featured 18 cubic foot model needed to have a rating of under 485 kilowatt-hours per year, and a 22 cubic foot unit needed to have a rating of less than 535 kilowatt-hours per year." (From here [kouba-cavallo.com])

My fridge costs me about $20 a month to run in electricity, according to a nice little power meter I picked up from thinkgeek a while back. My Windows box uses more then twice as much. Leaving my Windows box online all the time costs me MORE THEN MY DSL.

Now, the power usage of the Terastation is not much better... 683 Kwh /year or about $23 a month.

I don't mind spending cash on hardware. Spending money on power is just dumb, especially when I could be spending less.

Re:news?

[jherekc]

The torrents Blizzard uses for updates to World of Warcraft are standard torrents. If you open up their updater executable you can find the torrent file and load it into a standard BitTorrent client.

Re:Missing something

[hacker]

My Linksys WRT54G [wikipedia.org] (not GS) is a transparent Squid [squid-cache.org] proxy already. I don't see why this ASUS machine can't do the same.

It points to a secondary FreeBSD [freebsd.org] machine for that, because I have a 5GiB cache on the Squid [squid-cache.org] side. Everything is anonymized through Privoxy [privoxy.org] + Tor [eff.org], with no configuration changes on the client side.

Users don't even know (or care) that their traffic is being proxied or anonymized at all.

For user data stored on the FreeBSD machine, I also use [gnu-designs.com] rsnapshot [rsnapshot.org] to do backups of another disk slice that is GELI encrypted as well, which works out very nicely for the overall solution.

Everything that goes out port 80 (or comes back in on the response) through the Linksys is redirected through the Squid [squid-cache.org] server on the FreeBSD [freebsd.org] machine. iptables(1) [netfilter.org] on the Linksys does all the magic for me, as follows:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i br0 -s ! 10.0.1.6 -p tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to 10.0.1.6:3128
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o br0 -s 10.0.1.0/24 -d 10.0.1.6 -j SNAT --to 10.0.1.2
iptables -A FORWARD -s 10.0.1.0/24 -d 10.0.1.6 -i br0 -o br0 -p tcp --dport 3128 -j ACCEPT

There's more to it, but that should get you started. Its really easy to implement, and I'd trust my FreeBSD [freebsd.org] machine to process those packets faster than the processor on the Linksys ever could (not even considering the storage requirements for such a caching mechanism).

The Squid [squid-cache.org] cache on the FreeBSD [freebsd.org] side resides on a partition that is GELI encrypted [freebsd.org]. Do I have anything to hide? No, but I do have a right to protect the identity of my users, their browsing habits and their data.

Everyone else should do the same (or similar).