What's the easiest way to control a download box?

PardonTheWait

PardonTheWait

PardonTheWait

Soldato
Joined
26 Aug 2003
Posts
24,290
Right so... my little Mac Mini that lives under the telly, I really should be using it to download my completely legal Newsgroup downloads. But mostly I download them on this (iMac, main machine) and sort it all out after.

These completely legal files were being stored on this machine and the Mini was running most of its stuff off here, but I'm having a shuffle, swapping my firewire drives so the big fella's on the Mac Mini with all my completely legal media, and the smaller one's going to be time machine for this (My boot drive's actually only like 160gig full so it's plenty big enough at 320gig).

What's the easiest way to control Unison (or another newsgroup client, I'm happy to change if it'll make life easier) on the Mini, from here?

All I have set up at the moment is screen sharing for doing bits and bobs, checking on stuff it's doing without switching on the TV it's attached to and so on.

I was thinking of automator, like set up a folder action so I can just save an .NZB, drop it in a folder and that folder action will kick Unison into opening it? Reckon that's easiest?

Seems it to me but networky stuff and remote controlling machines and all this stuff isn't really my forte so I won't be the least bit surprised if one of you kids tells me a vastly simpler method :)

Basically what I want to be able to do is find an nzb online, download it, and have the Mac Mini deal with it from that point on, ie download and store it.

Cheers
 
What you could do is have dropbox installed on both macs and download the nzb's to the dropbox folder on your imac. these files will then sync to the mini.

then use sabnzbd+ and set it to monitor your dropbox folder on the mini. sabnzdb+ will then download, par and rar everything for you.

hope that helps.
 
I could do that without dropbox though right? I could just save them to the desktop and plop them in a shortcut folder on my desktop, or save them directly to that monitored folder myself?

Still sounds an excellent idea though I may look into it. I hear a lot about sabnzbd+, is it much better than Unison? I've had no qualms with Unison whatsoever myself, can Unison monitor a folder like that too?
 
An automator task monitoring a folder has to be a great way to handle your legal files, surely?
 
So in the snow leopard version of automator it's a piece of cake to do this, can't work out how to do it properly in the 10.5 one which my mini is running. Reluctant to update it to 10.6 yet, looks like I might have to though.

Looks like it'll work in the end though :)
 
Above automator suggestion with SABNZBD+ which runs in the background and will auto start (with a daily timer to limit intrusion on net use at peak times) should be able to do what you want.
 
If you've got an iphone too, then there's a sabnzb+ app for it so you can queue up your downloads straight from the iphone from anywhere and your macmini will download them.
 
Worked lovely, set up sabnzbd+ on the Mini and it's monitoring a folder. Put an alias to the folder on this machine's dock so any completely legal stuff I want it to fetch I download and drop the .nzbs in there. Cheers kids :)
 
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