A rails iPhone webapp

I now run rtorrent as my torrent client of choice on my tonido plug. I can’t recommend it highly enough, especially in conjunction with rutorrent webUI.

One of the problems I had was that rtorrent is so efficient in using the bandwidth that it makes browsing very sluggish. Whenever I wanted to use the internet for something else, I used to ssh into the box and terminate the rtorrent process or at least throttle it from the webUI. However, my father also uses the internet connection and I needed a much simpler way to control how much of the bandwidth rtorrent uses.

One way could me using rutorrent and cutting it down to just barebones. However this solution seemed inelegant. rtorrent has an excellent XML-RPC implementation to control most of its actions. In fact, rutorrent uses this to control rtorrent. So, I thought why not use Rails to write a small webapp for iPhone to use XML RPC and do basic throttling and status reporting? Rails was probably too much for this application. Especially given that I didn’t need a database. Perhaps something like sinatra should’ve sufficed. However, it turned out to be exceedingly simple to write it in rails and I did so anyway.

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How to install deluge headless on the Tonidoplug

First boot the TonidoPlug from an external hard drive, follow the directions here: http://tonidouser.com/doku.php?id=advanceduses:usbboot.

I had trouble doing it, it turns out my USB hub was faulty and wasn’t letting the TonidoPlug detect the hard disk at boot time. I changed it and this works like a charm.

Now you are freed from the crippling limit of the 512MB internal flash, assuming you’ve booted off a nice big hard drive.

ssh into the plug. The default password is nosoup4u for the user root. It’s recommended you change it as soon as you log in.

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Plugged in and customized

I received my TonidoPlug after a 6 week wait post placing order. Tonidoplug is a low cost : 100$ + 30$ shipping to India + 560INR in duties, low power: of the order of 5W computer that runs Ubuntu. The first thing I set up on the plug was a static dhcp server. I wanted each device to have a fixed IP address that was centrally managed. The Tonido software that comes built-in with the plug computer sadly lacks a DHCP server module.

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