Astro

During my stud­ies, in­ter­net ac­cess was quite lim­ited, and each stu­dent had a set quota of data they could down­load. Network us­age how­ever within the Australian aca­d­e­mic net­work was free and fast, so there was great mo­ti­va­tion to be ‘data lo­calvores’.

Astro helped by crawl­ing the uni­ver­sity net­work (a set range of in­ter­nal IP ad­dresses), in­clud­ing all the res­i­den­tial col­leges. These were reg­u­lar stu­dents’ com­put­ers full of mu­sic, movies, games and such. Metadata for each file was in­dexed into a data­base, which could be queried us­ing a easy web in­ter­face.

Files could be down­loaded by click­ing on the search re­sults, or file shares browsed us­ing your com­put­er’s in-built SMB ca­pa­bil­i­ties. This was a (much loved) side-pro­ject dur­ing my stud­ies and need­less to say was soon shut down when the RIAA started su­ing peo­ple left, right and cen­tre.