That would definitely make an interesting how-to. As a home based repair tech I think you'll find these two sites (among 1,000s available) very interesting:

http://www.podnutz.com/

http://www.technibble.com/ (esp the forums, but whole site is good - despite the dated layout)

And I guarantee you'll listen to this episode more then once: Podnutz Episode 35: More Tech and Business with Bryce from Technibble.com

These are quality posts. Why don't I see a Digg button anywhere?

After the network card died on my long time, dedicated torrent machine, a Compaq running XP/utorrent, I pulled a retired (2006) Gateway out of the closet, installed Suse 11.1/Kde 4/Ktorrent but for some reason kept experiencing random but frequent network drops. Stalled torrents over and over.

Checked router, Network Mgr, ifconfig etc. I used to spend endless hours tinkering with buggy distros but at this point if the distro fails at basic functionality I just wipe it and move on.

Installed PCLinuxOS 2009.2/KDE 3.5/Transmission 1.72 and all is well. I remembered your advice from the last torrent post and port forwarded my router. With Transmission the increase in d/l speed was dramatic.

Oddly before, with uTorrent randomly selecting ports every time, port forwarding did not seem necessary. Big torrents blasted - I could watch the d/l bar moving (3 Mb ADSL connection). Tiny torrents trickled as expected.....

Anyway----I'm off today, rambling (fast typist), because you included Transmission and I wanted to give Transmission a big thumbs up. All torrent clients just manage distributed data transfer but uTorrent is (IMHO) the standard against which all such clients should be compared. And Transmission is right up there, very close.

http://www.transmissionbt.com/ 1.73 release.

For anyone interested in router port forwarding with step by step instructions:
http://portforward.com/

Despite the absence of a Digg button ;P I submitted this anyway: http://digg.com/software/upcoming

"Newcomer Linux Operating Systems - a comparative analysis". That would be a project but an interesting project - you think?

I heard about 419eater around a year ago here: http://tllts.org/ and they had a lot of amusing anecdotes to go along with the site, including their favorite (ie stupidest) scammers etc.

I watched the entire episode this clip is from when first broadcast and it is amazing how gullible (and greedy) some highly educated, upstanding citizens can be. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJdC4R4hrHU

Hey Squeaky - I was going to post this at the most recent (and VERY well written) torrent article but thought it better here.

After our exchange regarding ISP throttling I recalled this being mentioned somewhere on one of the many tech podcasts I listen to. I tracked it down and here it is: http://podnutz.com/tgtd007 and the pertinent section starts around 50:00 and runs about 3-4 minutes (although the whole episode is worth a listen).

The guy speaking is Russ Wenner (link to his own podcast is on show page) who is CTO and sysadmin at a mid-size tech company. He also has monthly, 2 hour appearances on Computer America, a radio show.

Cheers - D.

Thanks again for the comprehensive reply.

Re encryption -- the idea is to thwart/bypass unfriendly ISP filters. I use Demonoid almost exclusively - like 99% - and Demonoid does not traffic in "bad" torrents.

I've saved this page to my "BTStuff" folder for further study and research. Looking forward to future articles on this (and other) topics dude. Thanks again and hope you land a position soon. :-)