I’ve got a technical question for you. The demise of Oink and my rapidly-depleting server disk space have put me in the market for a new Bittorrent solution. I’m not up to administering a properly RAIDed box (getting it to email me when a disk fails is just too much of a pain, given the difficulty of sending mail out from a consumer ISP connection). And having a constantly-running PC fan in the living room is kind of annoying.
What I’d really like is to buy a network-attached storage device that has Bittorrent baked in. Something with RAID that’d sit quietly and download stuff, and that doesn’t cost too much money. There’s this thing, which looks promising but has so-so customer reviews — folks say it’s kind of loud and has flaky firmware. This is a bit pricier — you have to supply the disks, and I haven’t got spare SATA drives lying around — but apparently supports BT.
I imagine there’s a third option: get a cheaper, dumber RAID NAS and figure out a way to run BT on my router. It looks like this is possible with a custom firmware, but perhaps only with the user-unfriendly OpenWRT. Given how little I can find online about this subject (and the fact that I’ve only used DD-WRT and Sveasoft before), I’m a little wary of trying it.
So what do you say, internets? Any suggestions?
Why is it difficult to send mail from a consumer ISP connection?
And what has OiNK got to do with where you run your BT client? (Couldn’t you get a dumb NAS, offload a bunch of stuff from it, and run BT as you were before?)
It’s difficult because Verizon & co. typically won’t let you relay mail the way that a real server could (this is done to help prevent spam). So instead you have to set up a POP3/SMTP bridge to your server that makes use of a real server’s mail connection. In practice I’ve found this to be harder than it sounds (at least under Fedora Core 4) — Sendmail’s configuration system is weird (and macro-based), and the one or two times I got it working it forgot the settings within a day. I have no idea why — some rogue daemon, I’m sure, but I decided not to bother trying to hunt it down. A RAIDed NAS would presumably have mechanisms to take care of all this.
And I didn’t mean to imply that OiNK specifically requires a smart NAS, just that my BT use has fallen off with its closure, providing a window for changing my configuration up. You’re right that I could keep a server around running the BT client and storing data on a dumber NAS, but I’d prefer to get rid of the server to reduce fan noise and failure points (and electricity use).
I see (actually I don’t, really, but I now see that it is anyway nontrivial).
The only times I’ve ever had/wanted to send mail programmatically I’ve done it via (you guessed it) python, connecting to, in this case, smtp.comcast.net.