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Building a BitTorrent Rig with the Zotac ZBOX Nano Plus

Manufacturer:	Zotac
Product:	ZBOX Nano VD01 Plus
Date:	Tue, Dec 20, 2011 - 12:00 AM
Written By:	Ken Brown -
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Building a BitTorrent Machine – Installing the Software

The Zotac ZBOX is a great platform for anyone wanting to put a PC in area that traditionally doesn’t see computers.  You can definitely use the ZBOX as a home theater PC to push your multimedia to your big screen, but in my opinion, you can do much more than that with the ZBOX. Personally, it makes for an excellent secondary PC.  There is enough power from the VIA CPU to surf the net, Skype, listen to music, and watch videos – almost everything you would do normally on your home PC – all in the palm of your hand.

Windows 7 64-bit Install:

We used a flash drive to load a new copy of Windows 7 64-bit on to the ZBOX Nano.  The built in 320GB hard drive is convenient, but it’s not as a SSD drive of course. 

With few problems getting our OS installed, we updated all of the Window drivers and prepared to set up the BitTorrent software.

Antivirus Software:

The first piece of software we want to install is a virus scanner.  When dealing with BitTorrents it is a good idea to protect yourself from ‘nasties’.  We are using Norton Antivirus, but there are many alternatives that work just fine.  A very popular free Antivirus software is AVG Free (http://free.avg.com).

Spyware Software:

We chose to install Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware as our spyware software to use on this BitTorrent machine.  Lavasoft is one of the original pioneers of spyware software and have been around  since the early days. The free version of Ad-Aware version that we are using does enough to keep the our machine clean of malware that could affect performance.

Of course installing anti-malware doesn’t stop or BT machine for doing its job.  We just want to make sure that we aren’t overexposing ourselves when we start sharing data with thousands of our friends on the internet. Better be safe now than sorry later on.

IP Blocker:

For those building a BitTorrent build, we highly recommend some form of IP blocker. IP blocking stops certain connections or certain IP ranges from connecting to your machine.  Whether you are downloading legal material or not, it’s never a good thing to get a letter from your ISP to ‘cease and desist’ all your downloading. 

To protect your online activities from being monitored and all those ‘watchdog’ websites from taking your IP number and transmitting them to your ISP or media giant who is against P-2-P transfer activities, you need to get an IP Blocker.  These blockers are commonly used as preventions to “brute force” attacks to computer systems. 

Some BitTorrent client software has built-in blockers, but it seems that the stand alone software is more “full-featured”.  We chose to install PeerBlock 1.1 whis is based on the same code as the classic PeerGuardian.
There is a nice little wizard that you can use if you have no idea what you are doing.  For us, we just needed to stop anti-P2P organizations along with spyware and adware from snooping in on us.

You want to make sure your blocking software database of IP addresses is up to date so don’t be afraid to have PeerBlock update your software every day or every other day.  Remember, people are getting really smart about how they spy on your file sharing activities.  You have to be smart too.

Peer Block, like many other IP blockers, can load custom blacklists or “allow” lists so that you can tailor your sharing access. 

You can read a ton more about how to customize and tweak PeerBlock from their website here:   We have provided just enough information to get you up and running fairly secure. Remember that your mileage may vary and that no method of protection is foolproof. 

Now that we are fairly secure in our P2P footprint, let’s get our BitTorrent client installed and ready for Torrenting! 

Next Page - Vuze BitTorrent Software

Review Index

Page 1 - Building a BitTorrent Machine with Zotac’s ZBOX Nano Plus Page 2 - Inside the Zotac ZBOX Nano Plus Page 3 - Benchmarks of the Zotac ZBOX Nano Page 4 - Building a BitTorrent Machine – Installing the Software Page 5 - Vuze BitTorrent Software Page 6 - Port Forwarding and Router Settings Page 7 - Configuring the BitTorrent Search

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