1. Rapidshare forces users to click a download link, even if they are premium users
2. Often times downloads are split into multiple parts

This guide will set you up for downloading everything you want from Rapidshare through Firefox, with the use of some handy addons.

Set Up Direct Downloads
This is something that can be configured through your Rapidshare premium account. Log in to your account and look for the account settings link. You want to look for the configuration section and make sure that Direct Downloads is checked off. Then you can save your changes. This ensures that if you are logged into your Rapidshare account you will be able to bypass the button click to download files. Simply pointing your browser to a valid file will let you download it. We’re almost done here, but DON’T click log out. Because of how Rapidshare works, as long as you are logged in you can continue to download without clicking the link and logging into your account.

Getting a Download Manager
Since at FHB we try to stay as cross platform as possible, I’m recommending one of the best addon’s you’ll find for Firefox, DownThemAll! DTA! lets you quickly download all the links or images present on a page. It also offers you a comprehensive download manager as well as a host of other options. I suggest you check out our post on DTA! for a full run-down. Regardless, even if you don’t use Rapidshare files, you’ll want to install this addon. There’s no point in using it just yet though as you’ll find that Rapidshare links are often posted as text instead of actual click-able links (referred to as Anchor tags). This is a problem since DTA! can only read actual links, so we’ll need some sort of mediator between the two.

FlashGot (The Mediator)
FlashGot also allows us to highlight links and select download, but it also offers us the handy ability to highlight a selection of text links and select “FlashGot Selection” to download them. This is what allows us one-click access to downloading Rapidshare files. The Problem with FlashGot is, it doesn’t come with its own download manager. It just sets up everything so that another download manager can get use them. When you first start FlashGot it will ask you what download manager you want to use, make sure you slect DownThemAll!. And that’s it, with this addon in tow, we’ve now got an excellent way to download any illegal legal rapidshare files.

KeePass, which works on any Windows, Linux and Mac’s is a password remembering utility that works to not only store your passwords, but lets you organize and re-enter them into their specific websites easily.

KeePass stores the passwords in a .db file that you can move from Operating System to Operating System without losing your important passwords. You can use KeePass to generate your passwords, save them in an encrypted format, and with a quick short cut enter them into the website that they belong to.

KeePass Password Creation

Ping It!
DNS servers work like a giant table. On one side is the URL and on the other side is hte IP address. When you type in a URL it basically goes through the table, finds the URL, and then redirects you to the IP address associated to it. This is all a very high-level explanation, but basically DNS servers take the URL and make it an IP. If you think your DNS servers may be down, simply pop open your command prompt or terminal and ping this address: 74.125.127.100

That address is the default address for Google’s servers, which respond to ping (unlike the Mircosoft ones).

To ping it, just type: ping 74.125.127.100

On windows it will send out 4 packets by default and in Linux, it will keep sending them until you force stop with CTRL+C

If everything goes well (you’ll receive a little report at the end on windows) you’ll know it’s your DNS. This is because if we bypass the DNS and use the IP directly, we can see that it works fine.

Fix It!
This is a little more complicated. In order to fix it you’ll need the help of something else. Since the only problem is your DNS server, it stands to reason that changing it will solve the problem. However, picking a good DNS is a little harder, since you are trusting them to always direct you to the same place. If, for example, it was a malicious user running their own DNS setup, then they could redirect you anywhere they wanted, regardless of what address you typed into your browser. I’d suggest OpenDNS. They’re great, they’re fast, and they’re probably the most reliable (short of connecting directly to the web’s DNS system – where every DNS server connects to)

If you are behind a router, then you can keep reading, however, if you have a direct connection to the internet, then I suggest you head over to OpenDNS and get started there. They’ll walk you through setting it up regardless of your connection type.

Configure Your Router
When you’re going through the website at OpenDNS, they will give you IP addresses of their two DNS servers that you can connect to. Note these down. And keep going. You may as well make an account because OpenDNS allows for web-stats to be monitored by you. Once you’re done you’ll want to connect to your routers web interface. Depending on your router, the default address for this will change. For me it was 192.168.1.1 and it will be the same for almost every Linysys router. Since I’m running DD-WRT, my interface will look quite a bit different from yours, but the setup is still essentially the same.

The section you are looking for is this:

You’ll want to change it to the ip address of the DNS server that OpenDNS gave you.

Then just hit the save button and you’re all done. From now on any outages you get either won’t be DNS related or OpenDNS will let you know as soon as it happens, so you’re not sitting around wondering why you can’t Google.