Feisty for the Family PART THREE : Torrent-time with TorrentFlux.
Jun 30
In part three of our little manual we are going to get adventurous. One of the things the normal household in this day and age cannot live without is bittorrent. Sure you might raise your hands in innocence and shout “No Sir Not me !!” but when I look away ever so briefly I can just bet my bunnies that you’ll be checking on the download of your latest “educational” dvd download of Jenna Jamessons latest flick. But seriously. What I have seen many times over in the average families of today is that everybody uses peer to peer. Either its the tech savvy geek-of-the-house who knows how to download, what to open and what not, and most importantly how to preserve that precious upload limit cap, to the teenage sister who just clicks on all kinds of crap using bearshare, opens up everything, infects her pc and blows the roof off the upload limit by sharing out her entire download directory to the planet. All of this resulting in poor bandwidth for the family, extra ISP bills, infected pc’s and a headache for whomever needs to clean up the mess (yes, thats you ! )
Furthermore if you DO choose to walk the illegal path of peer to peer file sharing, you also know that in order to download stuff, the client pc’s need to be connected all the time. And with the whole kyoto thing, having three pc’s up and running to download three different mp3’s.. Its not very economical is it. So in this part of the manual we are going to set up a web based bittorent client on your Feisty family server. It will allow all the members of your family to access it via their web client (without downloading any software on their own pc’s) They can search and select the content they want to download and give the server the go-ahead to do it. The big plus is that there will only be ONE pc running to fetch the downloads for the family, its in a safe enviroment ( = NOT WINDOWS) and more importantly , YOU as the family geek can keep an eye on whats going on in the download AND upload department. Interested ? So lets get cracking and install Torrentflux on your Feisty fawn or edgy eft ubuntu server.
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The setup.
In parts one and two our little manual we have setup a Feisty ubuntu server for the family, and have enabled simple but secure filesharing. Now its time to go one step beyond : Settig up a central bittorrent client for the family that they can access from anywhere (if you want to they can even access it across the net) The family can search for torrents using a webpage, select them for download, let the bittorrent client on your Feisty server do its thing, and download the completed file FROM the feisty server to their computer. Cool huh !
In order to do this we need a application called Torrentflux. It will use our Apache webserver (the A in lamp) Sql and some PHP to make the magic work. (thats why we need a LAMP server to get it done) So lets start of by beginning to download the package. Open you
SSH client and login to the Feisty family server and type
wget http://belnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/torrentflux/torrentflux_2.1.tar.gz
Next you need to set the Root password for SQL. I would love to explain why but even if you knew why it wouldn’t help you diddly squat and so i’m not going to.
mysqladmin -u root -p password <YourNewPassword>
Replace <yournewpassword> with your own password you use to login to your linux machine.
If it asks you for a password after you enter this line, just leave it blank and hit enter.
Next up its time to unpack torrentflux.
Just copy paste these lines and replace <Yournewpassword> with the new pasword you chose earlier.
tar zxvf torrentflux_2.1.tar.gz
cd torrentflux_2.1
mysqladmin -u root -p create torrentflux
<YourNewPassword>
cd sql
mysql -u root -p torrentflux < mysql_torrentflux.sql
<YourNewPassword>
cd ../html
Now we just need to tinker the Config.php file (please don’t ask me why , just do it)
sudo nano config.php
Edit the settings so they look like this .
Pres CTRL-X and choose to save the file.
Allmost there
Next up we will make the directory where Torrentflux is going to reside and where our downloads are going to end up and copy all the configuration stuff to the right place
sudo mkdir /var/www/tf
sudo cp -rf * /var/www/tf
cd /home
sudo mkdir shared
sudo chmod 777 shared
cd shared
mkdir torrent
chmod 777 torrent
Believe it or not , that should be it. In your browser hit http://ip-address-of-your-server.
Now you might see a page with the folder www and tf. Click on the TF folder and Sjazaaam :
Next up create a directory where you want to store your files.
/home/torrents
sudo chmod 777 /home/torrents
Log in ( with the username and password you provided earlier) and click on the ADMIN button.
Next up : change the path to a folder where you want your downloads to go (make sure to end with a /) So that would be /home/torrents/
Now you have everything running, make user accounts for yourself, your mom, dad sister and so on and let them use the program.
Using the Samba manual share the download directory over samba so your family can easily pull the downloads of the server once they are done. ( TIP ! Make the SAMBA share read only, that way they cannot accidently delete eachothers downloads) You can clean up the download directory using the http interface.
And you can now easily keep track of who is downloading what, manage the bandwith they are using and so forth. There are a lot of options inside the torrentflux program that let you manage the peer to peer traffic of your geek world.
So have fun !
- Thanx to Calvin and the People of Howtoforge.com for their great manual that inspired me to do this one.
- Check out our other articles on torrentflux here
- The original Torrentflux homepage
- Part one of this feisty manual : Setting up a server and webmin.
- Part two of this feisty manual : Settign up Filesharing with Samba
