Pause button and Kill button

BitComet BitComet Feature Requests
1

From time to time I need to pause all activity to clear or reduce the BW for a period of time. This would be a nice addition;

When I get a virus alert, my virus program fights with BC to gain control of the infected file. This usually winds up with an abnormal power down or reboot on my part to cease the infected operation. A Kill button would be one way to make BC more user friendly. Especially since the manual stop function does not stop the current operations immediately. My ports remain busy for up to 5 minutes after the stop command is given.

BC could do a much better job of indicating exactly what is going on in the background after all functions have been stopped or even before any functions have been activated.

2

You can do a pause from the taskbar by selecting “suspend all active tasks”, from the menu. There may be a way to do that from the floating window too, but I don’t use it so I dunno.

A part of this conflict is the AV’s fault. I’ve seen the conflict you’re talking about, where the AV deletes the file, BC re-downloads it, AV deletes it again, etc.

It would be much better if the command-line AV could be told to halt on detection of an infection. Some of them do or can be told to. In that case control stays with the av’s error report, and BC is in a suspended state for that task until the AV window closes.

Some very popular AV’s lack this feature, alas.

What you can do depends on your AV’s capabilities. First check into whether it can do this halt thing. The first thing to try is BitComet’s “autodetect” function for antivirus. It may know what parameters to use and will automatically insert them. Or there may be a pause function available, but BC doesn’t know about it. You can insert that parameter yourself.

If you’re attached to the AV you’ve got, explore the command line options, then edit the av scan command in your BC options to include whatever you decided.

Most command-line functions should at least return a DOS errorlevel. That means you can write a batch program that mimics the halt function. Yeah. Well, it can be done, anyway. Just find a DOS batch programmer anymore.

I think you’d have much better luck pushing from the other end, insisting that your favorite AV’s vendor include the “pause on infection” feature in their CLI. It shouldn’t be BC’s job to accommodate all kinds of different behaviors. This ought to be standardized.

But on your next point. no bittorrent client does or can stop port operations immediately. They cannot. They can stop sending operations, but traffic will continue to arrive from other peers in the swarm, for as long as it takes those peers to get word that you are no longer in the swarm. That can easily take an hour or more until everybody successfully rescrapes the tracker and gets an updated metafile with you no longer listed. This doesn’t prevent you from shutting BC down. But those packets will continue to arrive. They’re harmless.

3

Thanks for the tips. Next time the AV situation hits, I’m gonna attempt to batch the AV behaviors. This one may have the built-in feature, I haven’t looked yet. But I do see the point about BC trying to control other pgm behaviors.

As for the quick stop, I didn’t want to stop the swarm by dumping out but if I understand correctly now, this will only affect the overall swarm in a minimal fashion. That being the case, I have a kill switch for that!

4

As I said, there’s no need to kill it. You can simply stop listening, whether that’s by telling BC to stop, shutting BC down, or shutting your computer down.

It doesn’t hurt them or you to keep trying to send to you, it just won’t work since you’re not listening (one way or another) anymore.