Dan Harper

While publishing my latest Nettuts+ post, a screencast tutorial on setting up a LAMP server with Ubuntu, I first needed to get the video, a 150mb archive, to the editor.

Now, I could have uploaded the file through FTP to my own server then sent him the link, but I’ve developed a bit of a distrust of FTP with it corrupting a few of my files, and with an upload speed of ~45kb/s I only wanted to do this once.

So I went with Rapidshare: a popular file hosting service. About an hour later, the file was uploaded and I sent the link off to Jeffrey to be published.

Now, you may be aware that the Tuts+ network allow their authors to publish the Premium tutorials they’ve created to the Tuts+ Marketplace for people who would rather use their marketplace allowance to buy the occasional premium tutorial than purchase a recurring Tuts+ Premium membership. So I also needed to get this 150mb archive up on the Marketplace ASAP to maximise the number of potential buyers.

So I could have uploaded the file through the marketplace’s web-based file uploader, but I knew there had to be a faster way. Well, the marketplace also allow you to upload your large files via FTP if you prefer, but as I mentioned I don’t really trust my connection with FTP.

But I do trust my web server’s connection. So how do I go about using my web server to upload a file hosted on Rapidshare to my FTP account at Envato? SSH!

Typically to download a Rapidshare file you must either:

1. Be a ‘free’ user, wait for a count-down and enter a Captcha before the download starts
2. Be a Premium member (which I am) and the download starts immediatly

So I need a way to log in to Rapidshare account on my web server so I can get an instant download. I could have figured out the details behind logging in and storing a cookie, but I remembered Rapidshare allow you to mark any of your files as “TrafficShare” which means that this anyone downloading the file will be treated as a Premium user and the traffic they use will be deducted from your own download limit.

With my file marked as “TrafficShare”, I connected to my server through SSH and entered:

$ wget http://rapidshare.com/path/to/my/file

This downloaded the file to the server almost instantly. Now I could FTP this file to my Envato account:

$ ftp ftp.marketplace.envato.com
Connected to ftp.marketplace.envato.com.
220
Name (ftp.marketplace.envato.com): danharper
331 Please specifiy the password.
Password: 
230 Login successful.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.

ftp> put nettuts-ubuntu-server.tgz

A few seconds later, the file had been sent over! This whole process took about 5 minutes, as opposed to the hour it would have taken me to upload it over my own connection.