Image by Getty Images via Daylife

…is now up! FixOracle.Net in its first incarnation fixes the type of dodgy Oracle code we’re using on our current project, but since the ‘fixing engine’ is shared between the web site, the winform tool, and the command line tool, when I figure out what casts are missing, I’ll add them too.

In the mean time http://www.fixoracle.net is where you need to go for the absolute best in web design and hot advert-clicking-for-your-friends action.

Well, they’re not going to click themselves.

Image via Wikipedia

Many of my friends often wonder how to avoid their corporate firewalls, and secure their traffic against snooper. Well, its pretty easy to avoid the network traffic cops.

People need a method to be safe anywhere where they end up logging on outside their homes, where they have (mostly) all of the privacy and security they need.

Maybe they just want to browse the latest torrents, or god forbid run a P2P client outside their own network.

Obviously there are many restricted uses of corporate resources, (should you really be downloading playmate images at any time outside your own home?!) but reading private emails in your dinner hour? Checking how your shares are doing ready for the purchase of your 60ft yacht?

Well I often wondered that too; how I’m going to get a 60 foot yacht, not about tunnelling IP traffic !

It turns out my esteemed WPF co-worker, Tim Haughton, has just put up a nice blog entry about how to set yourself up to do just that. Check out the offending blog entry He’s articulated much better than I could.

Oh, and happy surfing.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Looking at the Live Mesh peer-to-peer synch
• First look: Wuala online P2P backup service makes us nervous
• My Essential Guide To Downloading a Free Podcast
• ‘Innocent Infringement’ As A Way To Lower Copyright Infringement Damages?
• Sharing documents without feeling vulnerable
• FCC: Comcast interfering with Internet traffic violated principles of Internet

I’ve had the slow download problem for over 2 years now, and finally managed to fix it tonight. Fair enough, the upgrade to the latest firmware may have helped, but i was still getting less than 2Kbytes a second with the defaults.

After fiddling with port forwarding on my router, I ended up putting upload and download limits into the boxes that state that 0 means unlimited.

since I’m still on Virgin Media’s extortionate £25 a month for 4Mbit connections, i entered 4096 in the download box, and 128 in the upload box.

I’m aware that the boxes state KB/s , note the upper case KB , so it should mean Kilo Bytes per second, but if i put 512 in there, the download rates didn’t increase.

I put 4096 in there, and suddenly I’m getting over 100KB/s on the download. Go figure.

Anyway, I think the best thing to do is port forward the standard ports from your router to the Synology Box using TCP only. Then start entering ever increasing numbers into those connection speed boxes, until you hit a number that lets your torrents take off.

here’s the evidence :

that’s over 100KB a second, and it peaked at almost 200KB/s too. uTorrent manages about 10KB/s more, but I can live with that now I can turn off my PC

Happy torrent-ing!

When I originally installed my Subversion server on the Synology box way back in March 07 the firmware on the box was pretty much OEM. I’d tweaked the firmware to allow telnet, but that was about the only upgrade I’d got.

Well, since my I received my winning iPod I hadn’t really considered using the full capability of the Synology box, including it’s iTunes server.

So, I’ve bit the bullet, and upgraded the firmware!

Braving the WHOPPING 300 version number difference, i downloaded the latest firmware from the Synology site, and installed it, after making sure my SVN repository was backed up of course!

Anyway, the update went without a hitch, and , WOW, what a difference on the front end. First of all they’ve gone all Ajax-y – there are lots of interactive panels and controls now compared with the old static pages.

After i’d finished playing with all the sliding panels, I booted up Putty to check the telnet access. Yep,  still there. I referred back to the old article on installing SVN on the Synology box, and upgraded the packages using IPKG.

However, when i came to boot up the svnserve daemon I started getting missing lib errors. I’ve seen some of those in the original article comments, and lots of people had mailed me saying that the instructions don’t work. So, I poked around, and found that IPKG hadn’t actually upgraded all of the packages successfully. Scrolling back up the window there were two errors downloading some of the package updates. So, I re-ran IPKG upgrading again, and this time the packages did download ok.

I ran svnserve, and it fired up immediately. Going back to my PC, straight into TortoiseSVN’s repository browser, and we’re back in business.

So, if you’ve followed the original Synology Subversion article, and are having problems – make sure you don’t have any errors when running IPKG. If you do , re-run it and let it re-try download the missing dependent packages, or alternatively download them by hand and copy them to the Synology box by hand.

So, I can confirm that the original Synology Subversion Hack & Install does still work on the DS106e with the very latest firmware.

And, now I can get to my music via iTunes too. Synology you guys ROCK.

It turns out that the temporary download area is off limits from the normal interface, and unless the download completes successfully, the Synology bit torrent client doesn’t copy the file from it’s internal download area to your shared folder.) So I guess if it can’t find the shared folder, that’s why it stopped at 100% and I couldn’t see the completed file! Duh!

Telnet to the rescue!

Luckily, if you’ve installed the Telnet hack ( see my previous entry on Installing Subversion ) you can find the completed (but uncopied file) in the Client’s temporary folder. Here’s the steps I used to recover my completed but unfinished download

1. Login to your Synology box as root
2. cd /volume1/@downloads

at this point , you should see a folder full of numbered subfolder, in my case there were 3 folders, numbered 34,35 and 36. Each one of these folders represents an unfinished download.

for each of the numbered folders execute an ‘ls’ command followed by the folder name , in my case the first command would have been

3. ls 34

do this (changing the folder name) for each of your folders in the @downloads directory. When you come across your completed but uncopied download stop. My file was in the folder named ’36′

Next we issue a copy command to copy the completed file to a shared folder I can see – in this case I had a shared folder called ‘downloads’.

4. cp 36/VSMar07CTP_VSTS_7PartsTotal.part05.rar /volume1/downloads/

assuming all goes well, (and you have enough space) your file should now be accessible from your windows machine.

Lastly , now we’ve got our file safely from the clutches of the Download Redirector, we can safely remove it. Open up the D/L redirector, highlight your download and click remove!

Done!