Tuesday, January 30, 2007

itsDargens / kerjodando p2p Server Down


The its Dargens website and kerjodando p2p server are down due to an issue at our host company Netrino ltd.

We received the following messages from them:

25th Jan 2007

Dear Customer
As you are no doubt aware, last year both Redbus Interhouse, the company from which we purchase most of our data centre space, and Telecity were both acquired by the investment group 3i to form TelecityRedbus, the single largest data centre operator in Europe. Since the date of the sale, wholesale prices have increased rapidly, partly due to the monopoly on space now held by the company, but also the scarcity of available space in the centres themselves with demand for space now far exceeding supply.
When we renewed our contracts last year, we were subjected to a significant price increase which saw our costs double overnight. We were determined not to compromise the excellent value of our dedicated servers and colocation space, and kept our retail pricing static despite the huge cost increase. We were able to achieve this partly because of the volume discounts we had negotiated on IP transit, but also by making savings numerous savings within the company. One of the savings was with our freelance staff which, we will be the first to admit, has had a serious affect on the quality of the support we have been able to give in the last year. Despite our best efforts to improve the situation, many customers have commented that the support we are currently able to offer is not as effective as a year ago, and this is something we are determined to change.
Once again, we come to renewal time for the first of our three data centre contracts and have found prices to increase by a further 60%. We have negotiated hard over the last month since we received the renewal price, but have been unable to achieve any reduction in this rate. We do not wish to be forced into making further savings to compromise our operation any further, and are also concerned about raising retail pricing in line with the costs as it would seriously upset the the excellent value our range of services offers.
After much contemplating, we have this week signed a deal with a new data centre provider, Blue Square Data, to relocate a large proportion of our operation to their flagship facility, Blue Square House in Maidenhead. The site is one of the strongest of the new data centres, with technical facilities of the same standard as the Docklands operations but at a price which offers far better value and will allow us to restart our investment in client support without having to make increases in our retail pricing. As contracts with Redbus expire over the coming year, we will be relocating the majority of servers currently housed in Redbus facilities to the new facility. Once a significant number of machines have moved, we will be relocating our London office to the Blue Square facility itself, giving us an on-site presence during office hours and ensuring any problem which requires attention to a physical server can be actioned far quicker than at the present time.
We will keep our two points of presence in Docklands ensuring we are able to take advantage of the IP transit deals we have negotiated, and have commissioned 2 x Gigabit circuits between the POP's and Blue Square to give a fully resilient backhaul to Docklands.
Your server is currently located in the area covered by our first contract, which expires at the end of the month. We therefore intend to relocate it to the new facility on the evening of Friday 26th January. The server will be shut down some time after 10pm and moved to the new facility where it will be reinstated on our new network node. We expect all work to be complete by 4am, although we aim to have no server offline for no longer than 2 hours. No IP address or other configuration changes are needed - the server will continue to operate as normal once active in the new building.
If you have any queries about this move, please drop us a line either by replying to this email, or calling on 0207 670 1670.




28th Jan 2007
It looks suspiciously like the disk in this machine is about to die. I might be able to rescue it for long enough to copy the files off, but to do so I need your root password as I can't even get as far as single user mode. Please let me know what it is if you would like me to attempt a rescue, if not, I think a reload with a new disk is the best solution.


30th Jan 2007
I've been over to the data centre this evening myself to try and get this working. It appears that /boot is corrupted, most probably due to the disk in your server failing. I'm going to have Luke take a look in the morning to see if he can work out a way of getting it to boot so you can recover data, but it is most likely that the disk will have to be replaced and a fresh OS installed.
I will update you once I have spoken to Luke. In the mean time, it would be sensible to ensure your backups are close at hand so that you can restore sites as necessary should a rebuild be needed.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Anonymous P2P in Work Place and University | Websense bypass | Web proxy avoidance


As an experiment I tried to use kerjodando p2p file sharing client in my work place behind the firewall and a websense proxy.

A difficult environment for p2p file sharing similar to that faced by many university students.

Kerjodando p2p (an ANts p2p mod originally developed by Italian student Gwren, Roberto Rossi) connected and I could upload and download files.

Moreover the connection was secure, encrypted and "anonymous" (friend to friend so IP address hidden as file location not linked to IP address as in ordinary file sharing applications).

Generally, to connect to a p2p file sharing network you need to meet three conditions:

  1. Your IP address needs to be externally visible to the internet
  2. You need an open communications port
  3. You need access to the internet to upload and download
Kerjodando p2p met these three contions as follows:
  1. When you click on a swarm "start" link at the swarm index site http://www.itsdargens.com/ the p2p client automatically downloads and sets up your external IP address even if you're behid a firewall, NAT or proxy.
  2. Kerjodando p2p spoofs SSL and uses port 443. So if you can surf the internet then it will connect and you can file share. Port 80 and 443 are used for web surfing.
  3. Again if you can surf the internet via a browser you can file share. You just need to set-up kerjodando p2p in the same way that the browser was set-up. In my case I looked in the Options|Advanced|connections and found the proxy port and address. I then entered these into kerjodando's proxy setting.
The great thing about this is that while you're file sharing it looks like you either using VOIP, SSL FTP or a secure connection to a website.

So all those students at Zeropaid.com who think that they have been locked out of file sharing now can do it in a secure way.

I am currently testing kerjodando p2p on this page click START KERJODANDO to download the Java client and connect to the test swarm.

You can also set up your own swarms to test.

There is no need to register or log in to use this website.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Ruby on Rail For Faster Downloads Updated

The website has been updated. Should be easier to connect to download faster.

Also, new "look and feel", see above, done by a new web designer. She is from Shanghai and I think her design show promise.





Do the following to download test MP3 / video and share your files.



Click of link HERE >>>>then download Thingy opens (yes to all questions) >>>>>connect>>>>>>search>>>>>download small file>>>END






You can look at "Test Swarm" page on Dargens here with out opening the download Thingy.



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Saturday, January 13, 2007

itsDargens.com New Bit Torrent type Ruby on Rails Website


Well its working - a new Bit Torrent type anonymous p2p website.



What I have done is to added a Bit Torrent type tracker to an existing anonymous p2p client (ANTs p2p, open source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANts_P2P )
this allows users to specify who they want to connect with.

Say if you were into ANIME or HENTAI and you wanted to share files and proxy files with others with a similar interest then you would go to itsDargens.com and create a swarm stating that.

You would send that swarm address (like a bit torrent link) to those who you wanted to join swarm.

Also other users could join the swarm by searching itsDargens.com say for ANIME or HENTAI so finding your swarm page.

To connect to your swarm a user just clicks the START link on your swarm page and it launches ANts p2p but with a filter that only allows them to link to people who have also clicked on that particular link.

After that it is the same as ANts p2p (searching and downloading) except that it is much FASTER and fairer as you provide proxy resources for those that share your interest!

Also, if you want to set up a private swarm that only you could invite people to then you would set your swarm as private.

The search would then not publish a link to it. You could then invite users to join by telling giving them the secret private link by email or private message.

Also, you can join up to two swarms at the same time if you register as a user.

This allows swarms to be linked forming a huge network of content that can be accessed anonymously.

For test see http://kerjodando.blogspot.com/2007/01/dargens-f2f-p2p-social-network-file.html

For itsDargens.com see http://www.itsdargens.com/

Would you help me to test this - just a few minutes of you time needed to download ANts p2p connect to a swarm then give me some feedback on ezzy.elliott@gmail.com

Also, if you have any suggestions for categories such as music adult Hentai etc please let me know.

Thanks in Advance bloggers

Monday, January 08, 2007

Issues Found During Test


I've just been trying kerjodando p2p at a few Internet cafés and I found these three issues:

1) When you click the " click here to start kerjodando: start " (on the test itsDargens.com page ) it gave an error. To get it to work I had to do "save as" and then open downloaded file.

2) Once the client was open it took a long time to connect so in the end I did "Connect to Neighbour address" in advance mode.

3) Dargens did not check that I had the latest version of Java installed.

Once I connected I could download MP3s and videos faster than bit torrent.

Hope these hints are helpful to alpha testers.

Dargens F2F P2P Social Network File Sharing Site Now Up for Alpha Testing

I would like to invite you to help me develop a new website.

It really look horrible at the moment but we are working on this.

Hopefully, this ugly version works.

Help me test just have a go for a couple of hours.

Click on link below:

http://www.itsdargens.com/swarm/show_one/66e9b69841ab84096cd197c88419cec3


Then

"click here to start kerjodando: Start " on page.

ITS A BIT LIKE BIT TORRENT.

This is the first open test so probable won't work - please feel free to send feedback.

Happy New Year.