Hello this isn’t strictly ‘selfhosted’ material but there seems to be a lot of networking knowledge in this group.
I’m thinking of leveraging my universities network to assist in downloading “Linux ISO’s” via torrent. I thought a cool little project would be and old rasberry pi with a battery pack, wifi radio and an external hdd in a box would be cool.
Considering I have to use a university supplied email and password, unique to me, to connect to the wifi (only once then it connects like normal). How obvious will it be that I am downloading “Linux ISO’s”? I’d definitely be running a VPN as a base level of privacy.
Also if there is a better community for this please point me in the right direction. Reddit’s adds were annoying but it was definitely easier to stumble onto relevant subreddits.
You would be much better off getting a seedbox and then grabbing your ISOs of it when complete.
Yeah that is true but we’ve grandfathered into a plan that is faster than it should be for the money but is limited to 500gb a month. I could get unlimited but it’d cost an extra $20 a month. This has never been a problem until I started building a plex library rather than just streaming. I managed to blow though that in two weeks just messing around.
Are you living on campus? If not then you being connected to some random network at all hours of the day could raise a flag.
You can VPN your traffic somewhere else but you run the risk of leaking traffic if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Before you post up some battery powered nonsense that is tied to you directly I would read the schools policy to see what it violates.
the amount of traffic going through the vpn may also look suspicious
“I’m backing up my computer to another location. “
sure. winkwink
Does your university allow you to use VPNs? Do they have any acceptable use policy? It’s unlikely they’ll care if you download a few cars, but they’ll probably get mad if you’re just trying to maximize bandwidth used for fun and wonder why you’re using so much.
Yeah I just looked up the policy and they specifically list downloading cars as something you shouldn’t do. I feel like they’re big enough that even if I downloaded 50gb a week it would be a drop in the ocean in their network. I’ve only got a 500gb limit at home right now so any amount helps. I just suppose it depends if they have alerts on for excess data usage by individuals… which they probably do.
I wouldn’t do this if I were you because any of your activity can be traced back to you via your credentials.
Don’t torrent. You’ll get caught. Learn to use IRC.
IRC as in Internet relay chat? I haven’t used it but how would it help me get around my loe data cap? I’m trying Robinhood some data not find obscure downloads. Even if someone provided me with some direct download links I still need to spend the data getting it onto my system.
Well you said torrenting is basically prohibited and the unanimous consensus here is that you’ll get caught. There’s probably no way to get around the data cap, but IRC will be indistinguishable from regular downloads and you’ll be safe there.
