Setting up a clip server

[BOFH666]

Hi guys and gals, was hoping to get your opinion on something.

Finally got my web connection sorted out over the weekend and happen to have enough old PC bits hanging around to build a dedicated server. The original plan was to put this up as a permanant(ish) Kazaa machine for tickle clips.

However, after a bit of testing Kazaa is proving to be a bit, umm, poor <cough> at finding the machine for all searchers, so I'm switching plans and seeing about putting an FTP server up. I'm planning on having this up and running sometime next weekend (15/16 Feb) and here's where I need some feedback.

Sadly my ISP doesn't give me a fixed IP address, so the link to the FTP server would change every so often. If it changed, for example, every week and I updated the link here when I needed to, would you still use the server?

There are other issues to sort out (uptime, simultanious users etc) but this is the main one, if it's going to be too much of a pain for people to use there's not much point in me doing it.

 

[Travis]

Sounds like a great idea to me.

 

[In_mE]

i would use it

are you on a broadband connection because they mainly have fixed ip?

InMe

 

[BOFH666]

Yeah, cheap ADSL connection so dynamic IP address. On the up side my ISP seems to be pretty slack in refreshing the list, so it may not be too bad.

As there seems to be at least some interest I'll see about getting a test server up and running sometime this weekend. Just to give some idea, if I get everything up it'd be something like 300 clips, although I'll only use a few on the test server.

Anyone else interested?

 

[unitkl]

Yes I would be interested in signing in to your server too! Tell me will I be able to upload and contribute some tickling files of my own? Or is it going to be a one way thing? Thanks.

 

[BOFH666]

Now there's a thought. Assuming that this all works as planned, I'd be happy to stick an upload directory in as well. As it's a frankenstein server (bodged together from bits of dead machines) there's not a huge amount of disk space, but can probably get up to 5Gb for files with a bit of luck. Think giving, say 1Gb over to uploads should be enough?

Again, don't get your hopes up just yet, still got to get the blasted thing working, but I'll do my best.

 

[darkone]

I would suggest...

If you want to skip ftp problems, set the server as a web instead.
It doesn't have to have a page, but if you set IIS (or Apache) to read a certain directory, then everything that's inside automatically turns to web page. If you have nothing with html, then it'll probably provide a list of the contents.
As far as the IP...Dinamically Assigned IP's work by giving you a lease of an IP on a period of time. If you continue to use that IP, it reassigns it to you. So for as long as the connection is always on, you won't change. If you do log off the network, it's possible that it'll assign the same IP if nobody else takes it before you log back in. So, a restart for example might not change it.
Last option of course would be to setup your own domain and ftp the files elsewhere so you get a permament public IP, even if it's on a shared system.
Now, for my last question, do you have a Public IP or a Private IP? being that you're not a commercial user (Big company), then you probably get a private IP, and if that's the case, you're screwed.

Rodrigo.

 

[BOFH666]

Yeah, it would have been easier but I spend way too much time writing web code at work (just wrote an app to do this very thing as it happens), besides what's the fun in doing things the easy way? 😀

As it happens, got it sorted and the server's up at 81.86.197.23 (there's another thread round here somewhere with the details). Providing my router doesn't go splat and need rebooting (oh to be able to afford Cisco kit at home, wonder if work would miss their 'redundant back up' unit...) the IP should stay the same. When it changes I'll post the new details on here.

Doing things that are strictly speaking Dumb(TM) to route this stuff over my network but it does work (kind of), though I'm definatley too tired when I forget you can't use an ADSL line to go out to your ISP and back in to test a server that's on your own network. Still, it's a disposable machine at the end of the day so if it gets whacked I don't care too much.

Cheers for the advice though, what I love about this place, it's so damn friendly compared to the shark tanks that most of the rest of the 'net is these days 😀