I’m not quite sure when it began, but this problem has been plaguing us for months now. My home network seems to have acquired a sudden and violent allergy to downloading torrents of all shapes and sizes.
We have a total of four computers currently on the network, and in regular use. Of them, Rincewind (the old server turned secondary windows desktop) and Vimes (”my” laptop that Penny monopolizes) generally shun the torrents, letting Hedwig (linux server) and Tarma (windows media center type bedroom computer) handle all the dirty work. Which is fine by them, since they’re the machines with the big processors, big ram, and big hard drives (though Rincewind does have a gig of ram and 300gb drive of his own now, shrug).
Traditionally, I have always preferred the command line python scripts to bulky gui applications. So… Hedwig has had a long and only slightly besmirched career as our primary download and redistrobution center.
When Hedwig moved home from the office after I quit my last job, I expected some slowdown - after all, we only have a 5 mbit downstream and 512 kbit upstream. The results of my first batch of downloads led me to believe that the torrent itself was somehow bugged - they were all healthy files with 10 or more seeds and 100 or more general users, yet even after a few hours running, I couldn’t manage to eke out more than 5kbps per torrent.
I let this slide for a while in the face of a new problem. One particular studio whose shows I was interested in watching was having problems with their single-episode torrents and recommended people to just use the batch torrents in stead. This is usually fine by me, but in this case, the batches were 25 episodes huge (~4.5gb) and I only needed one file out of the mix.
So, I hunted around for a client that would allow me to selectively download individual files from batch torrents, and was pleased to find BitComet. I installed it on Tarma and fired it up.
Instantly, I noticed a huge difference. BitComet was actually able to utilize my bandwidth and get me transfers at the rates my connection would actually support. It was great. But, I was still running the mud from home and didn’t want to lock out players, so I throttled things way back - leaving plenty of bandwidth open for no less than 10 users to do their bidding w/o any problems.
Yet… even with a dedicated portion of the pipe, users suddenly began to complain about inability to log in to the game. Once an active socket was opened, there were no problems, but people were generally incapable of opening said sockets…
About the same time, Penny started complaining from the couch that the laptop was having problems browsing web pages. I noticed that I too began to have problems opening up outgoing connections from any of our machines. I throttled the torrents waay back - leaving 3/4 of our bandwidth unused. And still, the problem did not go away.
I quit BitComet. The problem did not go away. I rebooted Tarma. No such luck there either.
Finally, I gave our router a violent kick to the head and rebooted it forcibly. The network was immediately cleansed and back to normal.
This problem has repeated itself numerous times since that first event. It became so reliable - if I so much as looked at BitComet, my network would sieze up - that I stopped downloading files all together until the mud had left the building. And then, I got into the habit of stopping torrents during the day so I could work, and then turning them back on when I went to sleep. I had assumed that BitComet was somehow opening up so many connections that it managed to exhaust the router’s capacity to handle them all.
Until today. [Cue dramatic music and lighting]
The answer (I hope) to all of my woes and problems finally hit me. BitComet was not leaving stale connections around. It has been overheating the router. See… they’re both fairly new (<1 year old) Linksys models, and this particular line of networking hardware is designed to stack together, so the router was sitting directly on top of the modem.
I figure the high number of different sockets created when added to the high amount of wan communication and the fact that Tarma is connected to the network via encrypted wifi (high amounts of radio energy plus extra computational power spent on every packet to maintain security) probably generated more heat than anything else I’ve done to this network.
Since, previously, my high traffic transactions had been mostly one-way communication (sending a file between two machines) and my torrents had been on Hedwig (who is plugged into the network via good old fashioned cat6 twisted pair)… yeah.
When I checked on my torrents this morning (Sousei no Aquarion for Penny), I noticed that they were acting unusually sluggish. Like really really slow. So, since I needed to get onto the web anyways to work on things, I went in to physically reboot the router. It was almost painfully hot to the touch. The modem underneath it was also practically a puddle of molten plastic.
I smacked myself in the head and proceeded to fashion a cardboard stand for the router from the packaging of some Atari computer game or another. There is now at least an inch of airflow between the two devices and I’ve had torrents running all day w/o interrupting my work.
I can even post rants on here and stuff 
Posted by Ammon as bittorrent, networking, sleep at 9:25 PM EST
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Well, today marks two WoW firsts for me.
I got my first real ‘honorable kill’ worth real points (253) without any assistance. Lvl 60 undead mage was terrorizing newbies on the tram. I wasn’t about to stand for that 
Today was also the first time I actually got a decent way into Blackrock Depths, the precursor instance to Molten Core (big notorious 40 man raid instance of fire and ashes and people with no lives). In fact, I have a screenshot of myself dead at the MC entrance because I attempted to attune solo after my group wiped for the last time and it wouldn’t let me step in because we weren’t set as a raid… blah… blah…
It was a much more profitable run than yesterday’s UD Strat marathon (did the place 3 times, didn’t get anything I could use). I checked off two quests on my list, got a very minor upgrade to my quiver (13% -> 14% attack speed increase) and got several high money value toys to sell/repurpose.
All in all, that about consumed my morning (4 hours because our priest was too low level and kept dying) and it established me in high favor with the administration of my new guild - earning me a promotion
Update (Jan 24, ‘06)
I finally got around to posting my most recent batch of screenshots. At least, I’ve posted the 5 new shots that were sitting on Tarma (I probably have some on Rincewind that I’m neglecting). All of my posted WoW screenshots are available for browsing at http://atuin.simud.org/~ammon/wow - and are sorted in a rather stupid order that I don’t feel like fixing any time soon. The pic of my prone corpse on the MC instance boundary is entitled “You must be in a raid”.
Posted by Ammon as play at 2:15 PM EST
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Yeesh. They just don’t know when to quit.
Last night, despite my best efforts to hack this package to prevent comment posting, they still managed to find some URL to allow them to do so… I got hit with 92 more spam comments.
In desperation, I started digging through the database schema and discovered that each post has a flag that determines what level of comments to allow. I edited the table to disable comments on all existing posts, changed the default value for new db entries, and found the line in the admin interface where I type new posts that was setting comments to ‘open’ by default and overriding the prefs stored in the db.
This time had better work 
Posted by Ammon as eat at 8:47 AM EST
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I currently have approximately 400gb of old anime fansubs lying around on hard drives here at home, and they need to be burnt off to dvd's in the worst way. I've been stalling until a few days ago when I finally decided to put some sort of effort into the archival. After three days of diligence, I have managed to produce a whopping 6 discs. Yup, six.
Why the slowness when it only takes 15 minutes to burn a dvd at 4x and only 30 more minutes to copy the files across the network in order to burn? Because I'm picky.
I want my shows to fit neatly onto discs. Given a standard issue series of 26 episodes at 175mb per file, it fits almost perfectly on a normal dvd. At least, it would, if the discs were like 50mb larger 
So, I shuffle and I juggle, and I try to find ways to fit the blasted data onto discs w/o having single episode leftovers... and usually I fail. I'd been trying to edit some of the larger files, cropping the closing credits or something to trim enough data to make things work. This is iffy at best - most of the time I have to either re-encode the video (a badness) or I suffer problems with a/v sync getting thrown all out of whack.
And then, a few seconds ago, it finally hit me. I can turn them into OGM files I mean, I use Vorbis to cut filesizes in half for my music library, so why not on my videos as well?
The thought had occurred to me previously, but I'd always dismissed it because the typical episode's audio track only takes up something like 20mb, and chopping 8-10 meg off of a file isn't enough to make much of a dent in my 50mb quota. At least, that's how my thought process was going at the time. Who knows what I was thinking. 8-10mb times 26 files makes an enormous difference
And it's a fast process too. I think my script takes something like 3 minutes per episode to re-package when running on Hedwig. And I'm normalizing the audio tracks while I'm at it.
Total savings on a 26 episode series when going from 128kbps CBR mp3 to ~64kbps VBR Vorbis? Well, I was hoping for about 250mb. After 12 episodes converted, however, I have already saved 163mb Woo! This puts me on track for an extra hundred meg that I wasn't expecting. Oh, and the files sound good too.
Me likey Vorbis lots. Heap big lots.
The script in question?
#!/usr/local/bin/php
<?
exec('ls *.avi',
$files);
foreach( $files as $file ) {
$fn =
substr($file,
0, -
4);
if( file_exists("$fn.ogm") ) {
echo "$fn.ogm already exists, skippingn";
continue;
}
echo "OGMifying $fnn----------n";
passthru("mplayer $fn.avi -vc dummy -vo null -ao pcm:file=$fn.wav");
passthru("normalize $fn.wav");
passthru("oggenc -b 64 $fn.wav");
unlink("$fn.wav");
passthru("ogmmerge -o $fn.ogm --noaudio $fn.avi $fn.ogg");
unlink("$fn.ogg");
}
?>
It's kind of clunky, really doesn't need to be done in php, and could be tuned up quite a bit, but meh, it's doing the job quite happily, and without supervision I should think about making it traverse the directory tree recursively and let it run overnight to convert everything.
Update
Yeehaw! Series completed. 387mb saved over 26 episodes. I'm busily making a simple little bash script to recursively call the php script above...
Posted by Ammon as work at 5:36 AM EST
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Yesterday, as I experienced a mixture of inexplicable stomach agony and post-server-recovery coma, I did my first anime marathon viewing in ages.
The show in question was Mai HiME. I watched 22 of the 26 episodes yesterday (having watched the previous four and the promo while waiting for A'tuin to come back online).
It is a fairly classic example of the highschool superheroes genre and reminds me of a cross between Shaman King, Utena, Final Fantasy 7, and Highlander.
What kind of wierded me out was that the show as a whole, while definately addressing some mature topics, was quite clean and generally suitable for viewing by the public at large. This was not the impression the promo gave - showing more skin and underwear in its 90 second montage than the entire actual series put together.
Because of this, I am led to believe that the promo was created in isolation of the rest of the show, potentially by a different team. Other than a few shots that might have actually happened during the show, I am fairly certain that it contains all original animation. Interesting discrepancies (aside from the whole dose of raciness):
- Mikoto's scabbard is a bright green in the promo. It is black throughout the entire series.
- The text at the beginning of the promo mentions '13 maidens' and the entire series repeatedly says that there are 12 until the absolute end. Truth is, there are 12 super-powered girls in the show (12 who count toward unlocking big badness of doom at the end) plus one fake (probably the number 13 mentioned in the promo) and one android.
- Mai introduces herself as 15 years old in the promo. I'm pretty sure the only time her age is mentioned in the series, she is 16. Though, I could be wrong about this one (and there is a birthday party episode).
I know that the manga has a different storyline, and that the anime actually started while the manga was still fairly new... so this could lead to the discrepancies. The manga is described as being more 'harem' genre (which my circle has always referred to as the 'loser guy' genre), so yeah.
There is also a 'sequel' series currently airing in Japan, Mai Otome (which is interestingly enough spelled 舞-乙HiME in the title animation). Having seen its promo and first episode, I notice a similar discrepancy - the promo is racier than the show so far. This second show is kind of alternate universe and also seems to be more in line with what I know about the manga so far.
I'm gonna poke around for some scanlations and see if I can put an end to this brain-melting concern. Yes. It is melting my brain. And that's a bad thing. Normally, I wouldn't care one bit, but I did just spend ~10 hours watching the show... and I'm tired...
Update (Jan 21, '06)
Yeah, the manga is absolutely completely 100% different story-wise. I found and read the first three volumes. Characters are completely different, character debuts happen in a different order, dead people are alive, alive people are dead, people who didn't have super powers in the anime do in the manga, etc... oh, and it is most definately loser guy/harem material. Chapter two or three winds up with the primary male character sharing a dorm room with 3 girls. Yeah.
That said, I've read several comments on forums and such where people seem to have liked the manga better. I couldn't disagree more. The manga plot is... well, wimpy. And that's kind of wierd for me. Most of the time, manga are much more detailed than the cartoons since they can afford to take the time to develop characters in different ways. In this case, the manga is mostly fight scenes and cardboard characters yelling at each other. Oh, and there are tentacles. Yeah. I thought that particular cliche went out of style in the late 80's. I don't plan on reading volume four.
Posted by Ammon as sleep at 11:10 AM EST
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