I must’ve done something right, for a change

Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of image hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

Sometimes it seems like all my notes here are mistakes I made, or strange behavior that I have to remind myself of what I did to work around it.

A perfect example is the network speed on my rtorrent slave, which has, within present memory, not gotten much better than 60kbps no matter what I’m downloading … torrents or direct links. I’ve tried everything from sysctl.conf parameters to completely new and different distros, but I kept hitting a glass ceiling.

But this morning, lo and behold, on a fresh Crux 2.5 system with rtorrent 0.8.2 and libtorrent 0.12.2 on that Samsung hard drive I mentioned, I’m getting download speeds where they ought to be — something in the range of 1Mbps. I wouldn’t lie about something like that.

I don’t know what to thank for that: Crux, which is different and more up-to-date compared to the Arch system I had installed; rtorrent, which has DHT enabled in versions after 0.8.0, if I remember right; or the hard drive … which I am quite skeptical of somehow releasing a 60kbps cap on network speeds.

But somewhere in the configuration or setup or general mishandling, I managed to set that system free. So there it is — a machine literally half alive, recovered from a garbage heap, running at a fraction of the speed new machines can handle, catching torrents from my network (and a friend too, actually), downloading them automagically and seeding them equally easily … and now with proper network speeds too.

Oh, happy day. 😉