Archive for June 18th, 2007

Torrent Throttling by ISPs, and a possible workaround

Throttling torrent traffic has (unfortunately) become a common practice among Internet Service Providers world wide. Malaysia isn’t sparred as most of the times, torrent downloads are excruciatingly slow. However, recently a possible solution has come to my attention. Behold TorrentFlux. Here’s a description of what it does, Xeroxed straight from its website:

TorrentFlux is a FREE PHP based Torrent client that runs on a web server. Manage all of your Torrent downloads through a convenient web interface from anywhere.

Sounds innocent enough? ;)

Think about the following scenario, you have an unlimited or underutilized bandwidth with a web hosting provider. You install TorrentFlux in it. Requires PHP, MySQL and Python though but these are fairly standard package bundled with most web hosting. Then you set it to download whatever torrent you need. Once these are done, you download them off your web site (which is usually fast, if it’s hosted in the same country). ISPs naturally don’t throttle traffic from your website, right? So there, you’ve just bypassed the traffic throttling. Also, this brings the added benefit of saving on your electricity bill as well as hardware wear and tear since you no longer need to leave your computer on for hours just so you can get a torrent download.

Of course, the scenario I provided above is just a fictional one and for educational purpose only. Whatever you do with that any ideas you may get after reading it is totally up to you.

Of web domains

I don’t know if my previous readers from ebernie.net will find this new site or not (well I’m hoping they will). My domain name expired and due to certain complications, I was unable to reacquire it. This led me to get assistance from my hosting provider (the old provider was my domain manager) to get this new domain. Unfortunately, for a certain time period, I’m unable to register www.ebernie.net. So this is my new site. I’m still fond of ebernie.net though so no doubt I’ll be registering that domain name again once it’s available. I’ll be redirecting my Feedburner to point to this new domain soon.

Hopefully, the new Bernie’s Ramblings will be rediscovered by Google search.