A Helpful Guide Through Our New Digital Age

I’m taking a class for the hell of it on web development and first day in we find it’s going to be taught by downloading and using XAMPP, which is an Apache Distribution of just about everything you’d need to host your own site. It setups an Apache web server with PHP, MySQL, SQLite, Perl and a good deal of other useful adds for ones website. This is ideal if you’re setting up a website on your home box.

It is fairly straightforward on how to set it up. Instructions can be found at the download site on starting up the Apache and MySQL database. It only takes about 7 steps to get a web site up and running.

Here are the instructions Prof. Batzinger gave the class to follow.

Running XAMPPlite for the first time

1. Download XAMPPlite (ZIP version) from http://www.xampp.org
2. Unzip the XAMPPlite folder on to your flash drive
3. Open a DOS window and make the XAMPPlite folder your working directory
4. Run xampp-portcheck and close any applications that are using ports 80, and 3306
5. Run setup_xampp to reconfigure the server for your drive
6. Run xampp_start to start the service
7. Use FireFox or IExplorer to browse the server at http://localhost

Shutting down XAMPPlite

1. Run xampp_stop to halt the service
2. Close the DOS windows
3. Unmount the drive from your computer

Restarting XAMPPlite

1. Run xampp-portcheck and close any applications that are using ports 80, and 3306
2. Run setup-xampp to reconfigure the server for your drive
3. Run xampp_start to start the service
4. Use FireFox or IExplorer to browse the server at http://localhost

I have my own MySQL and Apache server running on my Suse box in the livingroom so I haven’t taken the time to get this to work on Linux but if you’re interested in downloading the distribution for linux just go to: LAMPP, XAMPP for Linux.

I’ve been having a bit of an issue with bandwidth management. Any time I’d decide to download something over my Bittorrent client anyone wanting to view my website would either have most of the images missing and issues with text placement or just find my site wouldn’t respond. Bittorrent like most of the filesharing clients on the web eat up a good deal of one’s available bandwidth by default. I’ve downloaded and tested quite a few different clients but the best ones I’ve found are Azureus and µTorrent. My basis for judgement is that both of the clients have, in their options, the ability to optimize bandwidth usage.

Most sites go on about how just limiting the upload speed will improve you bandwidth but another important tip is to limit the number of active connections allowed per torrent file. Most are set so some gargantuan number and will increase with the number of active torrents you have running. I cut back drastically on my bandwith by seeting the max number of connections per torrent to a small number like 10 or so and reduced the number of active torrents to 3. I’ve also limited my upload speed to about 20 kB/s and maintain the share ratio to 1 to 1, which I change if I feel the torrent needs to be seeded longer due to lack of supporting seeders. You can also change the upload rate on a per torrent basis but I’ve not played with this option since I don’t see a logical reason to do so. Both of these programs have a scheduler, Azureus uses a plugin, that lets you manage what times of the day you want it to run, which can be handy if you know when you’re network utilization goes up during the day.

Between the 2 clients I’d suggest using µTorrent if you’re running a windows platform. Azureus uses way more available resources both in memory and in cpu usage, probably due to it’s use of JVM, Java virtual machine.

This is a quick tutorial to download, install, and run Azureus remotely on a Linux machine. The purpose for this is to remotely que downloads on your Linux box without having to be at your box and then be able to logout of your box and keep azureus running in the background. It’s useful to be able to add/remove torrents remotely as well as check on each torrents status.

To start off you’ll want to make sure you have the latest version of Java installed on your box which can be found here, I installed the JRE version. You may have to compile java and put it’s location in your environment path variable. This may be located in your .{csh,bash,…}rc file depending on which shell you’ll be running azureus under.

Next you’ll need to download the Java version of Azureus which can be found at SourceForge’s Azureus - Bittorrent Client. You’ll want to pick the appropriate file which will probably be Azureus_x.x.x.x_linux.tar.bz2 which you’ll have to untar using the “tar -jxvf filename’ command.

Next you’ll need to grab 2 more files, placing them in the root azureus directory, to get the client to run without an XWindows session (from the command line). The most current of the two files, log4j.jar and commons-cli.jar, can be located here.
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