didnt someone just say its not possible? lol <div>On 29/04/2008, Alan Pope <<a href="mailto:alan@popey.com">alan@popey.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">On Tue, 2008-04-29 at 14:03 +0100, Javad Ayaz wrote: > or ill just say its part of my going green aim!!! lol An admirable goal. Certainly a little nslu2 and a usb drive will take much less power than a multi-core CPU machine with a monster video card, driving a flat panel. What I do is have an old PC I was given for nothing which draws about 30W. It's a Dell Optiplex G1, which has the following specification:- $ grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo  # 400MHz CPU cpu MHz         : 398.790 $ grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo  # 192MiB RAM MemTotal:       190740 kB $ df | head -n 2 Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on # 6GB Disk /dev/sda1             5.7G  4.3G  1.1G  81% / Which is running Ubuntu Hardy Server (upgraded from Gutsy, previously upgraded from Feisty). I put it on my network and installed the necessary packages to enable me to logon to it:- (all the commands below are run on the server) $ sudo apt-get install ssh And then installed the rtorrent package to enable me to download torrents:- $ sudo apt-get install rtorrent Next we install the program "screen" which allows things to carry on running when you're disconnected:- $ sudo apt-get install screen Then on my desktop PC I go and find a torrent I want to download, ah, here is one:- <a href="http://releases.ubuntu.com/hardy/ubuntu-8.04-alternate-i386.iso.torrent">http://releases.ubuntu.com/hardy/ubuntu-8.04-alternate-i386.iso.torrent</a> I then open a terminal on my desktop and ssh from my desktop to the server:- $ ssh <a href="http://192.168.129.5">192.168.129.5</a> (Note: <a href="http://192.168.129.5">192.168.129.5</a> is the IP address my server has, yours may be different of course depending upon how you configured your network) I then get the torrent to the server machine:- $ wget <a href="http://releases.ubuntu.com/hardy/ubuntu-8.04-alternate-i386.iso.torrent">http://releases.ubuntu.com/hardy/ubuntu-8.04-alternate-i386.iso.torrent</a> Which gives output that looks like this:- <a href="http://pastebin.ubuntu-uk.org/872">http://pastebin.ubuntu-uk.org/872</a> Then run rtorrent:- $ screen -S hardytorrent rtorrent ubuntu-8.04-alternate-i386.iso.torrent This then gives a screen which looks like this:- <a href="http://pastebin.ubuntu-uk.org/873">http://pastebin.ubuntu-uk.org/873</a> (which shows that it's _just_ started downloading). A few minutes have now passed since I typed that and thanks to the lovely people at Ubuntu, and the equally lovely people at Virgin Media (providing me with a 20Mb/s connection) I get something like this:- <a href="http://pastebin.ubuntu-uk.org/874">http://pastebin.ubuntu-uk.org/874</a> Look at him go! 2 MegaBytes a second. Ok, I need to go for a cup of tea, and maybe shutdown my desktop for some contrived reason, so I press the following keys in the rtorrent session:- CTRL+A then D The word "[detached]" appears, which shows that I am no longer attached to the screen session. I can now logout of the server with:- CTRL+D Now I could shutdown my desktop, go to bed and dream of torrents. Time passes... WAKEY WAKEY! Rise and Shine! It's morning, which must mean it's time to check the torrents! So, we boot up the desktop and then ssh to the server:- $ ssh <a href="http://192.168.129.5">192.168.129.5</a> Now, lets see if that screen session (containing rtorrent) is still running by just typing this:- $ screen -ls There is a screen on:        21100.hardytorrent      (Detached) 1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-alan. So that means that my rtorrent is probably still running but nobody is attached, watching it. Lets re-attach to screen to see if it's finished torrenting the ISO image:- $ screen -r hardytorrent Ooh, it's finished:- <a href="http://pastebin.ubuntu-uk.org/876">http://pastebin.ubuntu-uk.org/876</a> (Note: I actually stopped rtorrent by accident and restarted it, but it carried on regardless) When finished, if I want to quit rtorrent (and hence screen) I press:- CTRL+q I then see:- [screen is terminating] Job done. I can now copy the files over from the server to my desktop using the Ubuntu/Gnome places menu to create a connection to my server. My manky old PC actually also has a USB drive attached, so I could rtorrent directly to it rather than store on the small internal hard disk, but as you can see, my usb disk is a bit full too :) Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb1             699G  690G  9.3G  99% /media/750GDisk :) Hope that's helpful. Cheers, Al. -- <a href="mailto:ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com">ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com</a> <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk</a> <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.org/UKTeam/">https://wiki.ubuntu.org/UKTeam/</a> </blockquote> </div>