I now own a PowerMac G3. I needed a machine to replace the Leechbox which I have now totally given up on. Had a hillarious time trying to get it working properly, couldn’t figure out why the optical drive tray kept ejecting when trying to boot from the OSX install disc. I eventually discovered it was a CD-ROM drive and began snapping plastic to replace it with a DVD-RW. After the install, OSX wouldn’t boot from the RAID array I created using the two HDDs salvaged from the old Leechbox. So, had to ditch one of the drives.

A quick search of available BitTorrent clients available for the Mac left me with the same choices I’d always had – TorrentFlux or Azureus with WebUI. TorrentFlux it is. If I had a copy of OSX Server, I would’ve simply compiled PHP support into the in-built version of Apache that comes with OSX, as it already includes MySQL. However since I’m running client which comes with neither, I opted to use Fink, which allows for pre-compiled binary packages to be installed using APT similar to Debian. A few apt-gets later I discovered that PHP and MySQL are part of the unstable tree, and have to be compiled manually, defeating the whole purpose. Finally I remembered MAMP which just includes everything in a nice point and click package.

So, installed MAMP, installed TorrentFlux – great. Set up AFP/SMB shares, fantastic – now to try a download. TORRENT DIED. Turns out there are pretty serious issues with TorrentFlux under Mac OSX. Basically, part of the kernel is killing timed out threads owned by Apache, there are some work arounds with mixed success, unfortunately none of them worked for me. OSX uses sysctl thanks its’ BSD roots, unfortunately one of the variables I need to change to permanently fix this doesn’t exist in the Mach kernel. Many many hours of Googling, and much frustration, I’m left with the client everyone loves to hate.