Lanetarium of May 2005, ddrgen updates

Last weekend, I went to Lanetarium. It was a little quiet though still enjoyable. Did a little experimentation with BitTorrent in a LAN environment, and it will still warrent further testing. The low turnout ment that there wasn’t enough popular files to really give the system a good test. The final hurdle to adoption is that creating torrents is a long process. Azureus has a wizard for it, but it still takes a fair bit of effort per file that really needs to be reduced. Anyway, my future ideas:

• Automatic mass torrent creation. Have a client side application that can go and “walk” through a directory and automatically create torrents based on that. Though the program would first check with the tracker wether or not the file exists, so as to avoid duplication.
• Fix the tracker software so that it uses an SQLite backend, rather than a flatfile system.
• Allow tracking of file requests, and be able to fulfill those requests. So say if you wanted to look for the Star Wars Episode 3 Trailer, you’d file a request. Someone with the trailer would then make a torrent for it and then satisfy the request.
• Basic user tracking. Things like a file upload, request or comment on a file should be identifiable as to whom did it.

I also tested ddrgen, the version I’ve been toying around with in SVN. I’ve fixed Windows 2003 Server support (as in, the detection of it), though I still have to have a look at Longhorn, making the whole system more portable (ie: remove the dependency on nmap and smbclient), and detecting more Quake 3-based games. Some of those changes will be coming in this week.

I have a nice Windows XP/amd64 trial to play with too now, and I should have a look at getting ddrgen working on Windows 2003 Server... because some people seem to like it as a server over Linux or BSD boxes.

Finally, the coffee spilt on my laptop during the Lanetarium has completely killed the touchpad and the keyboard is damaged. Both will need replacement, and I’m getting quotes on this done this week. It will probably cost over 100$, so I’m not terribly happy about it. I’m not taking it to Lanetarium anymore, that’s for sure.