Ubuntu 10.10 - Maverick Meerkat Discussion Thread

[von Stalhein]

What haven't I covered here?
I can't get this to go.
As you can see, I want it to start at everyday 1:58 am and terminate at 8:01am.
The "killall" is probably a bit agricultural as well I suppose.

# m h  dom mon dow   command
   58 1 * * * /usr/bin/deluge-gtk
   1 8 * * * killall deluge-gtk

[shift]

Originally Posted by von Stalhein

What haven't I covered here?
I can't get this to go.
As you can see, I want it to start at everyday 1:58 am and terminate at 8:01am.
The "killall" is probably a bit agricultural as well I suppose.

# m h  dom mon dow   command
   58 1 * * * /usr/bin/deluge-gtk
   1 8 * * * killall deluge-gtk

If that's a gtk based app, you'd need to give it a display to use.

[HyRax1]

Yeah, you need to add something like "--display :0" to the first line there, assuming that it supports specifying a display value like that.

Why do you want to launch and close the GTK interface on a schedule anyway?

[elvis]

I constantly see people try to start deluge in the GUI via cron, and likewise try to kill their torrent stuff via cron.

Deluge allows a daemon ("service") to run in the background. It can be controlled by a variety of systems, including GUI, web and command line.

On my file server, deluge-daemon autostarts at boot (standard boot scripts), and runs as user "tv" (don't ask). Deluge-web is installed to manage it from any machine in the house (or remote via VPN). Deluge-console can be used to fire commands at the running deluge-daemon, and do things like speed up or slow down running torrents. Deluge has also been set up to only seed to 200%, and then pause the running torrent (config variable "share_ratio_limit").

In /etc/rc.local (runs on boot after all other runlevels)

# Set torrents to be in "slow" mode on startup
# Daily schedule will speed these up when needed
su - tv -c "/home/tv/scripts/deluge_slow"

In /etc/crontab:

## 2:00 am offpeak - torrent
10 2	* * *	tv	/home/tv/scripts/deluge_fast

## 8:00 am midday onpeak - torrent
50 7   * * *   tv	/home/tv/scripts/deluge_slow

Scripts:

/home/tv/scripts/deluge_slow - Slows torrents down to 1kbit/s down, 1kbit/s up. Theoretically you could do fractions to slow it further.

#!/bin/bash
LOG=/home/tv/log/deluge_speed.log
date >> $LOG
deluge-console "config --set max_download_speed 1.0" >> $LOG
deluge-console "config --set max_upload_speed 1.0" >> $LOG

/home/tv/scripts/deluge_fast - speed it up to full speed download, 50kbit/s upload cap (because my ADSL2 connection is shit, and 50kbit/s is the sweet spot before I flood my own ACKs and reduce the download speed):

#!/bin/bash
LOG=/home/tv/log/deluge_speed.log
date >> $LOG
deluge-console "config --set max_download_speed -1" >> $LOG
deluge-console "config --set max_upload_speed 50.0" >> $LOG

You could do anything you like. If the speed up / slow down thing doesn't tickle you, then just do a start all / pause all instead.

[HyRax1]

In addition to the above, you can also modify the number of download slots via cron, which will allow you to cease or reduce downloading at peak times if required, but allow seeding uploads to continue (assuming your uploads don't contribute to your quota of course).

# Enable 5 active download slots at midnight and then set it to zero slots at midday.
0 0 * * * /usr/bin/deluge-console "config --set max_active_downloading 5"
0 12  * * * /usr/bin/deluge-console "config --set max_active_downloading 0"

[von Stalhein]

Thanks guys - yes, I think I have had it going as just the daemon at some time in the past, but I deleted/changed the cron file ages ago. I remember the Deluge install being different to this one now anyway.
As the (GUI) program was started by "deluge-gtk" I thought that was the command I should use in the file.

I'll go to school on all the suggestions above.

[von Stalhein]

Right, got the Deluge thing sorted thanka - a while back obviously!!!

Now, another issue I've been having for a while, and the tolerance level has just reached critical mass.

Refreshing software sources gives the following error:

Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/indicator-multiload/stable-daily/ubuntu/dists/maverick/main/source/Sources.gz  404  Not Found
Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/indicator-multiload/stable-daily/ubuntu/dists/maverick/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz  404  Not Found

What's the best way to fix that - just delete the entries? Am I missing update packages I should be getting?
I've chased the locations down in a browser, and it's not lying :-)

Would there be a substitute location that hasn't automagically updated?

[HyRax1]

Originally Posted by von Stalhein

What's the best way to fix that - just delete the entries? Am I missing update packages I should be getting?
I've chased the locations down in a browser, and it's not lying :-)

Would there be a substitute location that hasn't automagically updated?

Having a look at that PPA, it only has packages for Natty and Oneiric - nothing for Maverick and below.

While you can generally get away with using older repos with a given version of Ubuntu, you can't always get away with using newer. Doesn't hurt to try, however - I would simply expect dependencies to be unsatisfiable in a fail scenario.

Otherwise if you don't need the packages supplied by this PPA, then simply delete/comment those lines from your list, or delete the list files they are referenced in if they are separate.

[von Stalhein]

OK thanks, I'll probably comment them out. Yes I'd seen the later versions and didn't want to take the jump without checking.

I'm playing with Natty in a VM, but I think I'll wait to fully upgrade until the next LTS, so the minor inconsistencies simliar to this one will be about I suppose.