I have a PC that I use as server running Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron and I wanted to install a command-line torrent client and run it as a service to download & seed stuff with no need of a monitor or X attached to it (because I don’t have any of them :P ). So after trying a few clients I decided to stick to Transmission, Ubuntu’s default torrent client.
To get this working, this is what I did:
1) In order to use it as a service, you have to download transmission-cli package which has the transmission-daemon & transmission-remote bins.
2) Before this, I added a new apt sources to the /etc/sources.list because Ubuntu’s sources has a very out-of-date version. So open /etc/sources.list and add the following lines:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bortis/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bortis/ubuntu hardy main
Then update & install.
3) You should now have the client intalled. But to use it as a service / daemon, go to:
http://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/HeadlessUsageDebian
http://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/HeadlessUsage/General
and follow the instructions.
Remember to set the correct permissions to the TRANSMISSION_HOME & TORRENTFOLDER directories to allow writing & reading to the user you set in USERNAME.
I had some problems with transmission populating the default config file “settings.json”. What I did was to manually create the file and add this default content:
{
"blocklist-enabled": 0,
"download-dir": "\/shares\/internal\/PUBLIC\/Torrent\/work",
"download-limit": 100,
"download-limit-enabled": 0,
"encryption": 0,
"max-peers-global": 200,
"peer-port": 51413,
"pex-enabled": 1,
"port-forwarding-enabled": 1,
"rpc-access-control-list": "+127.0.0.1",
"rpc-authentication-required": 0,
"rpc-password": "",
"rpc-port": 9091,
"rpc-username": "",
"upload-limit": 40,
"upload-limit-enabled": 1
}
You can find out what options for this config files are available at:
http://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/EditConfigFiles
Hope it helps, cheers!
