OT talk geek to me - torrents and networked external hard drives?

With son going off to uni he's taking his PC with him. As any torrenty
type stuff I want is downloaded by and contained on this PC I need to
sort something out, like learning how to do it myself and getting
decent storage. I've been pointed at mininova and utorrent for this
and it looks simple enough, which leads to storage.

Boy child has said I can get a terrabyte (I remember the excitement of
our first 40 meg hard drive ffs) of external hard drive that he will
be able to access from any where he has net access.

So how does this work then? If it's behind the router firewall how
will he get to it? If he can get to it surely it then puts a
vulnerable point in the system?

Basically is this a good idea. Bear in mind I don't speak geek as you
explain ta.

Oh since his 'packing for uni' has consited of getting the PC sorted
what else does he need to take?

I've thought of bedding, plate, bowl, cutlery, bag of pasta, bag of
rice, clothes, stationery, toileteries.

 

**** knows. I've got some TVTorrent invites again. Do you want one? Very
easy to use: passes the Bear test. Send an email to the address in the sig
if you want one.

Is he so unlikely to pull that he won't need more than one plate?

Mugs. Towels (inc tea towels). Cereal, 1500 Pot Noodles, washing up liquid,
tin opener, corkscrew/bottle opener, kitchen roll, coffee/tea/squosh as
required. Sugar, salt & whatever else he chucks over his food. Sandwich
making ingredients.

Even if he confirmed the catered option: a frying pan, saucepan, wooden
spoon & spatula is always handy for Sunday fry-ups

 

If it's a NAS rather than USB drive, they generally have an FTP server
built in, so open the FTP port on the router & point it at the NAS.
You'll need a dynamic IP thingy such as dyndns.org if you haven't got a
fixed IP address, & a *strong* password for the FTP account.

If it's external USB, same rules apply except you'll need to run an FTP
server on the PC with the home directory pointing at the USB drive.

There are other options, but that's the way I'd do it. In fact that is
the way I do it.

--
Krusty
www.MuddyStuff.co.uk
Off-Road Classifieds

'02 MV Senna '03 Tiger 955i '96 Tiger '79 Fantic Hiro 250

 

Fucking great big party pack of condoms.

 

If you've dumped all your files onto an external drive for convenience
and backup, why not go for a mirrored/RAID solution? I've looked at NAS
but I've never found a really cheap one that does mirroring, which for
me is half the point (mainly photos and some music) of shoving
everything off local drives onto NAS.

 

He'll be able to get as many as he wants for free from the Student Union or
on campus health centre.

 

I 'mirror' the local drive[1] (or rather partitions on it) to the NAS
using SyncToy. This gives both redundancy & remote access without the
expense of a NAS RAID.

I wouldn't trust everything to a NAS RAID on its own, having once lost
a load of stuff when a RAID1 controller fucked up, effectively trashing
both disks. For total peace of mind you need it mirrored across
controllers as well as disks.

[1] Which itself is RAID1, giving another level of redundancy.

--
Krusty
www.MuddyStuff.co.uk
Off-Road Classifieds

'02 MV Senna '03 Tiger 955i '96 Tiger '79 Fantic Hiro 250

 

I can remember the excitement of getting a fucking 512K floppy drive for an
Atari 800. Cost me 300 squid and I got the bloody thing cheap too. You
obvously never had to use tapes to store and load programs.


--
Beav

VN 750
Zed 1000
OMF# 19

 

I got an old(ish) 2nd-hand PC [1] loaded Fedora and used Samba to share
things. Plenty cheapness.

[1] AMD Athlon 2600, 1GB RAM, Some disks (JBOD).

 

Cheap NAS, but perhaps not the way you were thinking of doing it.

http://www.freenas.org/

 

<tourettes>

"PIG WANKER!"

</tourettes>

 

Stab vest.

 

512k? Christ you were spoilt. I remember my 360k floppies.

 

360K, luxury.... 100K 40 track disks on the BBC B.

 

4 words and I'm lost.

Atm he's been looking at reviews and saying my computer would need
overhauling in order to support it...

 

I think he's been stock piling from the ones colege give out free and
then there's fresher's week and then the SU/health centre.

 

Good idea. Smart price vodka for him as despite my best efforts he's
not gone down the decent beer route.

 

Um, yes I did actually. But the one that I really remember is the 40
meg hard drive. And one my mate Martyn reminded me of yesterday - we
were the first people he knew with a CD burner at home and he
remembers the old disks with the £5 price tag for one.

 

Do they have things mininova doesn't have?

Heh. He's got of plate, side plate, bowl, knife, fork, spoon,
teaspoon, serving spoon. I can now get in my kitchen drawer.

5 of them, all ones he's bought or been given.

We would have mised this one ta. He has the 'dirty stop out' tea towel
and we're in negotiation as to which towels he's taking.

'Black and yellow'

'No chance that's my favourite, you can have the comedy dragon'

'How about the purple with spots'

'Hmmm, how about the plain purple'

and so on.

I don't like this.

He doesn't eat them, so 1500 mild curry super noodles instead and the
little pan that never gets used for anything but these.

Some ofLlaura's friends got him this sort of thing for his 18th. In
fact I need to get another decent corscrew as mine broke and I've been
using his.

He cooks, so we've been dividing the spice cupboard.

Do they let them have toasters in their rooms?

Got these, he's got the biggest frying pan, which still leaves me two
and the deep sided one. Plus an earthenware dish with lid for
shepherd's pie/slow oven cook things.

Mmm fry up. I'll shove one of the spoons in the box now.

<wanders off all teary eyed while he's in the shower and can't see me>

 

They aren't supposed to have them in their rooms. Also, the bedrooms will
have very sensitive smoke detectors. It was a twice weekly event to have to
evacuate my hall, even more frequently if it was raining and the pot
smokers wouldn't lounge about on the roof.