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I Offically Love Twofo- Twofo at Loughborough University

Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2009 3:59 pm
by Speedydowt
Hi guys,

Been using twofo for a while now (off campus, using port 4144), and I have to say it is an excellent idea for university.

Infact it is such a good idea I wanted to replicate it for loughborough university, if you guys don't mind me stealing afew of your ideas (and help!)

I really just wanted to gain an appreciation of how twofo really works, so far to my understanding the twofo server is located off campus and people on campus connects to their local machine (127.0.0.1), then stunnel encypts the connection using SSL and connects to an SSL server off campus, then the SSL server connects to the DC hub. Is this correct?

I have several Athlon x2 box's lying about at home, I'm going home for christmas tommorow so i thought i would take this oppotunity to setup the server at home to connect to when I get back to university.

How would I go about creating the server? Obviously I would need a public DC hub and a dynamic DNS name, but in terms of secruity and stunnel, what would you guys and girls suggest? (considering ITS here seems to be as strict as yours- although no one here has ever been disconnected, I would still like to host the hub off campus and get users to stunnel in)

In terms of the SSL server as well, is that located on the same box as the hub, or would I need a seperate box to run the SSL server?

I did have a brief convosation with Astropoint on the DC hub the other day and he was exceedingly helpful so did just want to say thanks to him as well!

Thanks guys/girls and congrats on a great Hub!

Tom

Re: I Offically Love Twofo- Twofo at Loughborough University

Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 6:50 pm
by astropoint
The SSL server runs on the same machine as teh DC hub itself just accepting connections and forwarding them onto the hub. You'd ideally want to provide people with a version of stunnel ready to go to connect to your SSL server so they can just connect to localhost:<portnumber> in their DC clients.

If you look at the stunnel.conf file we have for people to use you'll see there is a section saying
[twofo]
connect = hub.twofo.co.uk:4146
accept = 127.0.0.1:8000
This accepts connections from 127.0.0.1 on port 8000 (ie., the local DC client trying to connect) and sends them off to hub.twofo.co.uk (the twofo server) on port 4146 (the port the SSL server runs on).

Conversely on stunnel running on your server you would want something like

[dc]
accept = 4146
connect = 4144
This would accept all connections in on port 4146 and connect them to port 4144 (the port twofo actually runs on). Leastways as best I understand it that's what you would need, not really sure if Cocodude had to do anything to the hub to accept the slightly less than usual connections....

So with that you will need some sort of hostname thing, there are free ones available from http://www.dyndns.org along with programs to automatically change the IP the address is linked to if/when it changes. If your home ISP uses a dynamic DNS then this is a must so you don't have to fiddle around every time you drop off for whatever reason at home. You would also need to forward the port you want to run stunnel on at home in the router (along with the hub's port for the sake of completion I would suggest). I would suggest setting up a static IP for the home machine so again, should it get rebooted it's network IP won't change and require you to redo all the port forwards :P

Re: I Offically Love Twofo- Twofo at Loughborough University

Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 11:30 pm
by Speedydowt
Thats excellent advice, thanks again astro.

Been looking at a few DC++ servers (either linux or Win32), is there any you would recommend?

Re: I Offically Love Twofo- Twofo at Loughborough University

Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 11:34 pm
by astropoint
Well on Windows I only really know YnHub, and that works pretty well really.
Linux...twofo uses opendchub, which is quite old now but obviously still workable. I would avoid Verlihub as it won't work with stunnel (the later versions have a wonderful little patch that boots any user off the hub if they don't have the same IP set as the IP they have connected from, which ruins people trying to connect from stunnel with everybody appearing to connect from 127.0.0.1).

There's a complete list of various softwares you can try out at http://www.dslreports.com/faq/6545

Re: I Offically Love Twofo- Twofo at Loughborough University

Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2009 12:48 pm
by cocodude
I think also DB Hub at http://www.dbhub.org/ was a fork of opendchub and may have seen more development, even though it ceased towards the end of last year.

Possible crazy idea, but what about becoming a twofo franchise? I could always for loughborough.twofo.co.uk to be set up!

Re: I Offically Love Twofo- Twofo at Loughborough University

Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2009 1:16 pm
by Speedydowt
Excellent guys, thanks very much for the replies!

I will have a look into all the options, i have to thank you again for the consistent help and info- very much appreciated!

As for the franchise, what an excellent idea! Would love that very much indeed, would be great to discuss this further- Will send you a PM with my email/msn if thats ok?

Thanks again!

Re: I Offically Love Twofo- Twofo at Loughborough University

Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2009 1:27 pm
by cocodude
Speedydowt wrote:As for the franchise, what an excellent idea! Would love that very much indeed, would be great to discuss this further- Will send you a PM with my email/msn if thats ok?
Sure, please PM me on the forum and I'll reply.

Re: I Offically Love Twofo- Twofo at Loughborough University

Posted: Thu Aug 26, 2010 2:07 pm
by echelon
Twofo franchise :P

I can just see it in front of me... Twofo - Enabling Filesharing for students across the UK

Your friendly neighbourhood filesharers 8)