Why do I need a seedbox?
- Your ISP is blocking or throttling BitTorrent traffic.
- The IT department at your work is blocking or throttling BitTorrent traffic.
- You have a laptop and it is not practical to keep it running all the time.
- You travel a lot and rarely stay online for a significant period of time to download a full torrent.
- You are a member of a private torrent site and would like to maintain a good standing aka ratio.
- You are tired of overpaying for seedbox hosting at other places.
- And last, but not least, you’d like to maintain privacy!
What will I accomplish at the end of this howto?
- A Linux box running Transmission BitTorrent client with web based access. Web based access is also optimized for iPhone.
- A cross-platform desktop Transmission Remote GUI front end.
- FTP access to download completed downloads.
What do I need to begin this guide?
- Average computer skills.
- Minimal Linux knowledge (basic shell commands).
- A dedicated or VPS (Virtual Private Server) running CentOS 5.5 and above. Other similar distros might also work, but haven’t been tested yet. Your Linux distro needs to have a yum package manager.
- SSH client (e.g. PuTTY on a Windows machine; Terminal on a Mac machine)
- Ten minutes of your time. I was actually able to set this one up in under 4 minutes during one of the tests.
If you don’t have a server yet, don’t worry. Unless you are a very heavy-duty user, you probably won’t need a dedicated server. If you are unsure, go with a VPS. I don’t have any service provider recommendations at the moment, but I assure you there are plenty. Just do some research on torrent-friendly ones. 
Installation
I assume that you have obtained your server credentials (username and password) by now. Login to your server using the SSH client.
Installing prerequisites
First we are going to install a bunch of prerequisite software packages that we will need during the course of this tutorial. Issue the following command:
yum -y install wget bzip2 which gcc gcc-c++ make openssl-devel pkgconfig curl-devel perl-XML-Parser perl-libwww-perl gettext
yum -y upgradeThis installation might take a minute or two, depending on your server specs and connection speed.
Installing intltool
CentOS intltool package is out of date and a recent version is not available through the package manager. We must compile it from source. Don’t quit now. This isn’t as scary as it sounds. 
cd /usr/local/src
wget -q http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/intltool/0.40/intltool-0.40.6.tar.gz
tar zxf intltool-*.tar.gz
cd intltool-*
./configure --prefix=/usr && make -s && make -s installInstalling libevent
CentOS libevent package is out of date, just like intltool, so we resort to installing the latest version by hand.
cd /usr/local/src
wget -q --no-check-certificate https://github.com/downloads/libevent/libevent/libevent-2.0.17-stable.tar.gz
tar zxf libevent-*-stable.tar.gz
cd libevent-*-stable
./configure --prefix=/usr && make -s && make -s install && ldconfigInstalling Transmission
Transmission is the actual torrent application that you will be using. Again, just copy paste the commands into the SSH client window.
cd /usr/local/src
wget -q http://download.transmissionbt.com/files/transmission-2.50.tar.bz2
tar xjf transmission-*.tar.bz2
cd transmission-*
./configure --prefix=/usr LIBEVENT_CFLAGS=-I/usr/include LIBEVENT_LIBS="-L/usr/lib -levent"
make -s && make -s installAdd a user account for running the Transmission daemon application. You will be prompted to create a password. You will use that password to login and obtain the files that have been downloaded. Try to remember the password or write it down.
useradd -m transmission && passwd transmissionCreate init script for starting the daemon. Adapted from Jason Friedland’s implementation.
wget --no-check-certificate -q -O /etc/init.d/transmissiond https://gist.github.com/moltar/5187393/raw/
chmod 755 /etc/init.d/transmissiondSet the Transmission daemon to start automatically when the server is restarted:
chkconfig --add transmissiond
chkconfig --level 345 transmissiond onStart and stop the Transmission daemon. You must do this before proceeding to the next step. This ensures that everything up to now has been installed properly. Most important, this creates a default configuration file that we will be editing later on. You should see two green [OK] outputs after the completion.
service transmissiond start && service transmissiond stopNow we need to modify the Transmission configuration file. Replace the bold/underlined portion of the last two commands with your own username and password combination. You’ll use this to login to Transmission application.
cd /home/transmission/.config/transmission/
sed -i 's/^.*rpc-whitelist-enabled.*/"rpc-whitelist-enabled": false,/' settings.json
sed -i 's/^.*rpc-authentication-required.*/"rpc-authentication-required": true,/' settings.json
sed -i 's/^.*rpc-username.*/"rpc-username": "username",/' settings.json
sed -i 's/^.*rpc-password.*/"rpc-password": "password",/' settings.jsonCreate a directory for storing downloads:
mkdir -p /home/transmission/Downloads/
chown -R transmission.transmission /home/transmission/Downloads/
chmod g+w /home/transmission/Downloads/Finally start the Transmission daemon for good:
service transmissiond startInstalling ConfigServer Security & Firewall application
We are also going to install a ConfigServer Security & Firewall application. This application will help your server to stay secure and also ensure that the necessary ports are open for Transmission to function properly. This is an important step, please do not skip it. Hosting providers have different configurations of the default CentOS install and may block certain ports. This installation will ensure that the necessary ports are open and unnecessary ones remain closed.
cd /usr/local/src
wget -q http://www.configserver.com/free/csf.tgz
tar zxf csf.tgz
rm -f csf.tgz
cd csf
./install.generic.shNow that we have CSF installed, we’ll issue a few commands to “doctor” the configuration file and open/close some ports.
cd /etc/csf
sed -i 's/^TESTING =.*/TESTING = "0"/' csf.conf
sed -i 's/^TCP_IN =.*/TCP_IN = "21,22,9091,51413,30000:35000"/' csf.conf
sed -i 's/^TCP_OUT =.*/TCP_OUT = "1:65535"/' csf.conf
sed -i 's/^UDP_IN =.*/UDP_IN = "20,21,51413"/' csf.conf
sed -i 's/^UDP_OUT =.*/UDP_OUT = "1:65535"/' csf.conf
service csf restartTesting your installation
By now you should have the Transmission daemon running. Let’s go play!
Testing Transmission
Open the following URL in a new browser tab/window:
http://[YOUR_SERVER_IP]:9091/transmission/web/You will be prompted to enter a username and password. Use the same username and password you have created during the Transmission installation (the second one). Once logged in, you should see a Transmission web interface. Click “Open” and copy-paste the following URL to test the download functionality and speed:
http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/centos/6/isos/x86_64/CentOS-6.2-x86_64-LiveDVD.torrentYou should now see the download status bar increasing.
Testing SFTP Connection
Download, install and open FileZilla. Go to File -> Site Manager. Click “New Site“. Give it a good name. Under “Host” field put the server name (if you have one), or simply the IP of the server. Choose SFTP under “Server Type“. “Logon Type” set to “Normal”. Set the user to “transmission” and the password you have created during Transmission installation (the first one). Now click “Connect“, you should see FileZilla establishing the connection and then finally listing remote directories in the right hand side part of the window. You should see “Downloads” directory, this is where all of the download files will be stored.
Setting up Transmission Remote GUI
This is my favourite part about this whole setup. Not only you get a nice and fast web based client, but you can also set this up to be used with the desktop application! If you are migrating from µTorrent, then you’ll love this!
Head over to the Transmission Remote GUI project page and download a copy of the client. Install the software.
Once you have it open:
- Go to menu Torrents and select “Connect to daemon“.
- Enter the server IP into the “Remote host” field. Make sure not to put the whole URL (http://….), just put the IP part (e.g. “123.45.67.89″).
- Enter 9091 into the “Port” field.
- Enter your username and password you have set during the Transmission installation (the second one).
- Click “OK”.
Your desktop software should now be “talking” to your server. Note that this software only shows the status of the downloads, but you can’t actually access files through that UI. You still need to use the FTP client to download the completed torrents.
Updates
- March 4, 2012: Updated libevent version, updated to Transmission 2.50
- April 20, 2011: Trimmed yum package list, added
libeventinstructions, updated to Transmission 2.22. - November 2, 2010: Updated to Transmission 2.11.
- October 4, 2010: Added
whichto the list packages to install. Some people reported that missing on their systems. - September 29, 2010: Modified the tutorial to save source code to
/usr/local/src, rather than/tmpto avoid configurations withnoexecon/tmp. Got rid of vsftpd FTP server all together in favour of SCP/SFTP approach (thanks to P. Callisto’s suggestion). Disabled the verbose mode ontarand silented themake. - August 30, 2010: Added
libidn-develandzlib-develpackages per Kristen’s suggestion. - August 10, 2010: Updated to Transmission 2.04.
- July 7, 2010: Updated tutorial to Transmission 2.01. Added libevent-devel and libevent to yum command.
Thank you for the instruction. Following your guide, I have got into a trouble that I was not able to solve… I am new to Linux and it may be really simple problem…
[root@test transmission-2.01]# service transmissiond start
which: no transmission-daemon in (/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin)
It seems like there is no “transmission-daemon”… Could you help me with this?
Thanks in advance.
@nick: that message means that it cannot find the “transmission-daemon” binary. It can mean one of two things. Either transmission was not installed properly, or it simply can’t find it in the $PATH. Try running the following two commands:
updatedblocate transmission-daemonIf this finds the binary in some obscure location, you need to make sure you add the path to the directory where the binary is located to your $PATH. Or re-install transmission into the right path.
[root@test transmission-2.01]# updatedb
[root@test transmission-2.01]# locate transmission-daemon
[root@test transmission-2.01]#
I followed your direction and using “locate” gave me nothing. I tried re-installing (make and make install) Transmission but showed the same problem.
@nick: What did the install say at the end? It could have errored out for all I know. Did you see any errors while installing it?
Below is the make & make install message…
[root@test transmission-2.01]# make
Making all in doc
make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/doc’
make[1]: Nothing to be done for `all’.
make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/doc’
Making all in third-party
make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/third-party’
Making all in libnatpmp
make[2]: Entering directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/third-party/libnatpmp’
make[2]: Nothing to be done for `all’.
make[2]: Leaving directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/third-party/libnatpmp’
Making all in miniupnp
make[2]: Entering directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/third-party/miniupnp’
./updateminiupnpcstrings.sh ./miniupnpcstrings.h.in miniupnpcstrings.h
Detected OS [CentOS] version [5.3]
setting OS_STRING macro value to CentOS/5.3 in miniupnpcstrings.h.
make all-am
make[3]: Entering directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/third-party/miniupnp’
CC minisoap.o
CC miniwget.o
miniwget.c: In function ‘miniwget3’:
miniwget.c:48: warning: unused parameter ‘url’
AR libminiupnp.a
make[3]: Leaving directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/third-party/miniupnp’
make[2]: Leaving directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/third-party/miniupnp’
Making all in dht
make[2]: Entering directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/third-party/dht’
make[2]: Nothing to be done for `all’.
make[2]: Leaving directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/third-party/dht’
make[2]: Entering directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/third-party’
make[2]: Nothing to be done for `all-am’.
make[2]: Leaving directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/third-party’
make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/third-party’
Making all in libtransmission
make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/libtransmission’
CCLD blocklist-test
/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/libgssapi_krb5.so when searching for -lgssapi_krb5
/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/libgssapi_krb5.a when searching for -lgssapi_krb5
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lgssapi_krb5
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [blocklist-test] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/libtransmission’
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
[root@test transmission-2.01]# make install
Making install in doc
make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/doc’
make[2]: Entering directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/doc’
make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am’.
make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am’.
make[2]: Leaving directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/doc’
make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/doc’
Making install in third-party
make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/third-party’
make[1]: Nothing to be done for `install’.
make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/third-party’
Making install in libtransmission
make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/libtransmission’
CCLD blocklist-test
/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/libgssapi_krb5.so when searching for -lgssapi_krb5
/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/libgssapi_krb5.a when searching for -lgssapi_krb5
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lgssapi_krb5
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [blocklist-test] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/transmission-2.01/libtransmission’
make: *** [install-recursive] Error 1
————–
I really appreciate your help. Thanks.
@nick: try the following command and then re-run make and make install:
yum -y install krb5-devel@admin: Thank you! I got it working.
I’m a complete n00b at unix – do I paste these lines one at a time and hit enter? or copy paste the whole blocks of text?
How can i delete everything I’ve done and start over if I goof it up?
Hey Dave!
If you are a complete noob, then I recommend copy-pasting them line by line and watch for errors. If you get an errors, then stop immediately and record the error and first try googling the error and see if you can solve it yourself. If not, you can bring it here.
If you signed up with BurstNET, you can issue a re-image request through your account. They basically reinstall the server for you. But it might take some time though. The best way to practice is to sign up with Rackspace Cloud (affiliate link) and launch an instant fresh server, do the install and kill it. Don’t use it for production, or keep servers alive for longer than a test install, because then you are going to get charged a lot. If you are just testing, the charges should be no more than a few pennies per each installation attempt.
Works great, thanks!
hey thank you for tutorial
i love it!
im using the transmission/remote/gui and i like to seed,
but after running like 5-9ours in seed mode it gets Finished status!
Q[Do I have to switch to Start manualy]?
What You Do?
@GrZ: There is a setting in Transmission that turns off seeding after you reach a ratio of 2.0. You can increase that number or disable that feature all together by going to Tools -> Transmission Options, and look at “Seed ratio” setting.
hi,
please how to change peers limit and how how i can find the settings.json file ?
thanks
@harry: peer limit can be increased thru Transmission Options under Tools menu.
settings.jsonis in “/home/transmission/.config/transmission/“. Make sure to stoptransmission-daemonbefore making edits, otherwise they will revert back when you restart.Hello Sir,
I followed your directions, and got everything installed. I was able to download a torrent fine, and was downloading at 6-7 mb per second.
However now that the torrent is seeding, it is not uploading anything. I watched it attempt to upload to 4 peers in a row, and then nothing, nothing being uploaded.
Do you have any idea what could possibly be wrong? I am using burst hosting, did exactly what you said everything installed fine on the first try..
Anyway if you have time, I would appreciate it.
Thanks,
Joe
@Joseph Wunsch: My guess would be it is something to do with the firewall. Try stopping CSF and see if it changes anything. Keep in mind that CSF restarts itself every 5 minutes. Download something very popular to test with, to make sure there are people leeching. To stop CSF, issue the following command:
service csf stop@Moltar
This is great information. Really appreciate your effort.
I am just wondering.. if I were to use a VPS service in the US like BurstNET, would they not be obligated to turn over information about the subscribers who are using their service for downloading/seeding? Do you have any idea what the safeguards are? Just seems to me that the activity could be traced back, unless I am missing something.
The reason I bring this up is because most of the VPS services in the EU and APJ (where laws on p2p sharing are different) charge around $50/month for the resources one would need for a seedbox.
Thanks in advance,
Wamp66
@wamp66: I’m sorry, but I cannot give you any legal advice here. Theoretically anything is possible.
I’m trying to buy the VPS, but i have a question. They asked me for a domain. Should i purchase one, or if i have one already can i put that domain on the configuration page?
@filipe vaz: The domain doesn’t matter. You don’t even necessarily need one. You can always access your box by IP. If you wish, you can even use a subdomain from one of your existing domains. E.g.
seedbox.yourdomain.com.thank you.works great.. very nice job.
Transmission Remote GUI project page is reall very nice
I’m a complete noob.So,what do you mean by dedicated server?Can I use a second pc or really need a server?
@basty: If you are a complete noob, then this tutorial is not for you.
Hey Moltar, thanks for the great tutorial! My little seedbox is up and running… at least it’s seeding the centos distro image right now
I had some make errors similar to Nick did above. Tried your suggestion to him but that didn’t resolve things. Did some hunting around on my errors via google and installed these packages w/ yum:
yum -y install libidn-devel
yum -y install zlib-devel
This resolved my problems and everything else went flawlessly. Just posting in case that helps anyone else
Off to play with my seedbox.
@Kristen: Thank you for the suggestion. I will add these packages into the tutorial just in case.
how do i download the files directly on the web instead of using ftp? i’m not using a domain.
@jc david: not currently. I will be reworking the tutorial for that, as I find that useful as well. But it’s a more complicated setup though.
@moltar: FTP is not necessary. You have SSH access to the VPS so you can just use SCP/SFTP with your SSH credentials to transfer files.
If you are using Windows, WinSCP or Tunnelier are good SCP/SFTP clients. Fugu or RBrowser are available on the Mac for GUI, or you can just use scp/sftp from the terminal.
Passwords are sent over the wire in the clear with FTP, so this opens up a big hole for a security breach. Also, if your VPS is not in your home country, some ISPs throttle FTP traffic to other countries–SSH/SFTP/SCP are rarely throttled.
FTP is faster than SFTP/SCP, because the traffic has to be encrypted on the fly. Btw FileZilla also supports SFTP. I’ve been using FTP for over 10 years, and never had my password compromised. But I admit that it is technically possible if you are on an open network that is vulnerable to sniffing attacks.
Help! After awhile, i get a putty fatal error: server unexpectedly closed network connection
I tried rebooting my vps, i then got this putty error: Network Error: Connection refused
how do i fix this???
@jc david: Usually it takes a few minutes for VPS to reboot. If you are still getting this error, I recommend you contact your hosting provider, as that means that your server didn’t boot back up. I don’t believe it has anything to do with this tutorial.
Isn’t there any easy to setup a seedbox? Some script perhaps? I tried torrentflux, it worked fine on my system but when installed on a hosting account just accepts torrent file and doesn’t download the contents.
@Vinay: Not sure how much easier it can get. I outlined all the steps above. It takes me under 3 minutes to setup a seedbox, once I get the hosting account.
Thanks so much for this guide – it’s incredibly useful and straightforward. Great work!
Excellent, excellent howto! Thank you!
I was wondering if anyone knew of an offshore-hosted VPS (as in, not hosted in the US) within a similar price range to BurstNet (~$6/mo.)? Hosting the seedbox offshore would lead to even greater anonymity/privacy.
@p0laris: It is very unlikely. I am not saying there is nothing out there, but I did look and couldn’t find anything suitable. The reason is that bandwidth in US is very cheap, because infrastructure is there to support it. Europe comes close, but still not that cheap. If you find something, please let me know and I’ll offer it as an option here. I was thinking that once this site gains momentum, maybe I can make a deal with some off shore provider. So if any hosting owner reading this, holler at me!
great tutorial, I was able to set up a seedbox within 15 mins of getting my server credentials.
I’m just curious if other people who have used this method have received any kind of notice or warning from BurstNET in regards to the nature of the bandwidth use. I can’t imagine that Bittorrent is a service that they want being used on their servers, I’ve only had my server up and running less than 24 hours and I’ve noticed that while logged into my server via ssh I’ll get new mail prompts with the subject line ‘suspicious process running in service transmision-daemon’.
Has anyone who has used this service for a decent amount of time (+1 month) been warned by BurstNET or had their service revoked? There are no comments to the effect which is a good sign. Any info would be great, thanks.
@corrigann: I’ve had mine up since May. No notices. In fact I emailed BurstNet and they said it is fine as long as they do not receive any complaints. As for the notice you are getting, it is simply a notification from
lfd, which is part of thecsffirewall. The Transmission daemon process needs to be whitelisted. I did not include that part in the tutorial. It’s really harmless though. I will modify the tutorial soon to include that command.thanks for the quick reply. I figured the notices were harmless as they were only showing through ssh and not my actual email address.
i tried to change the location where the files would be saved, but i always get permission denied, can you help me?
Where did you change the location to? It has to be within the user’s home directory. E.g.
/home/$USERNAME/dirnamethanks man, cheapest seedbox yet, and doubles as everything else out there.
some people say that using rtorrent ends up with you getting a warning, some say torrenting in general on burstnet gets you reported.
Can you verify this?
P.S rtorrent or transmission?
No idea where you heard this. Myself and many others have been using Transmission on BurstNet, and so far I didn’t get any warnings.
After running through this, I at first got a Permission Denied error for the Transmission Interface. After I fixed that, I could no longer login via FTP.
Are there some steps you could give to fix the permissions for the home/transmission/Download folder? I am currently getting permission denied for the FTP, but I have access using the Transmission interface to download files.
Thanks
The easiest path of action would be to re-image the VPS and start over. You obviously missed a step somewhere.
removed the vsftpd and completely reinstalled and followed the install vsftpd commands. still get the following error when trying to login with Transmit on a Mac.
Error -203: miscellaneous error occurred while trying to login to the host
If I try to connect with a user that isn’t on the user_list, i’ll get a permission denied. When I try to connect with a user that is on the list, I get this error instead.
Sounds like a networking issue to me. Play around with FTP transfer mode (active/passive).
Great tutorial. I only got a problem with the FTP. So I created a new user to ftp member group. And I simply change the default folder connection for the user and the line CHROOT_LOCAL_USER=YES to make sure that the user can’t go back into other directory.
Hey Admin,
I must be a complete idiot, because I can’t even get PuTTy working constant access denied… I’m on BurstNet, what details should I be using?
Burst should have sent you SSH root access. Make sure your Putty settings are all correct, e.g. SSH, port 22, etc… Make sure you are not copy pasting extra characters like space in the password field.
Unless it’s my university blocking port 22 (If they were, would it still prompt me to login? :S) then I think Burst might have done something wrong, gonna have to contact them…?
Thanks anyway admin! Love the tut
Hey I have been following this guide and ran into an error I did not see discussed.
When trying to start the transmission service:
service transmissiond start
/etc/init.d/transmissiond: line 26: which: command not found
Any ideas for this one?
You must have used an obscure hosting service, and not BurstNet. As
whichis a pretty standard command that comes with most distributions. There is a call for that command on line 26 of the start up script. You seem to be missing that. Sorry, can’t be more of help.Thanks, I am using one hosted in another country due to my fear heh. Thanks for your hint tho, a simple yum which install fixed everything!
Great tutorial!
Do you mind sharing which offshore hosting service you are using? Is it any good?
I’m working out partnership details with one provider. It will be announced here soon. Check back in a few days.
I was using the Knowinserver and let moltar know about them. He has setup a special with them!
Glad it worked out Moltar!
I had the same error, just do a:
yum install which
Interesting… I’m going to add that to the list of packages to install, just in case.
How can I add more users for transmission login via server like another user copy of settings.json?
You cannot add another user. But what you can probably do, although I haven’t tested this, is to run another daemon instance under a different user and a different port number.
Man! Thank you so much! This was the best Tutorial/Manual I’ve ever had the pleasure to work through! Your, sir, are my hero!
Some comments above I read that more than one useraccount in transmission is not possible? If so, well, it is. I accidently added two users, now both are able to log in via ftp or the desktop transmission GUI.
My question: how do I reimage the VPS? Start over from scratch so to say, if I wanted to?
Thanks again, and btw, I was a complete noob – now I’m not anymore
…
learning by doing at it’s finest!
I think you figured this one out already
Great tutorial moltar!
I’ve got a box with VNC access, and when I look at /home/transmission its locked. I do not have permission to access the folder, is there any SSH commands you know of to unlock this folder so I can move files about? I’ve got utorrent running under box too, but certain sites do not permit me to use it, instead I’ve resorted to Transmission. Any help would be appreciated.
Sorry no idea.
Great howto. been using my seedbox for a little over a month now. No complaints whatever! I do have a suggestion though: Perhaps a secondary howto to enable this in Ubuntu? Burstnet has the option of several OS’s, and while I am an avid linux user, and have already found numerous other uses for my vps, including openvpn, squid, and sshfs to mount the remote directory so that instead of downloading items I can stream them directly off the VPS “shared folder”, as it were,
I would really love to see an ubuntu guide, rather than having to prowl through howto’s or get it up and running on my own.
The point, I know this is a revenue generating machine based on the reseller output, so it wouldn’t be bad to set it up so that the most widely *or at least OF the most widely* distributed linux distros is also in the howto.
Would be glad to share also, if you’re interested, how to set up an sshfs mount point, as well as openvpn and squid howto, for quick office browsing!
Great service. Cheers.
The reason I did this for CentOS, is because this is what I use. I wrote this originally purely just as a “note to self” kind of tutorial, then figured it might be useful to others and posted it online. Creating the tutorial for other flavours would require me learn another distro hehe. Also, there are requests for other torrent client tutorials as well. Different distros times different clients equals headache maintaining the tutorial. In the long run, I don’t think a preference for distro should haven an impact on your seedbox. Sure you like Ubuntu for every day use, but you can still run a CentOS machine for a seedbox. It’s not like you are going to be spending lots of time on the command line doing different tasks. 99% of the time you will use UI of the seedbox and SFTP to grab the files.
But I keep all the suggestions in mind, and who knows, maybe one day, I will expand this to other distros and other client flavours
Makes sense. I on the other hand have been spending a lot of time on the seedbox, well let’s say VPS, since I have squid running for proxying out of the office, and openvpn for my dedicated connection to watch Hulu, The CW and all those other US only shows. I do have it up and running on Centos, however, so it’s all good.
Hi!
First, thanks a lot for this great tutorial !
All is perfect, but I’ve got one problem.
After installation, when I try to add a torrent, all is good but every torrent status are “tracker did not respond” whereas when I’m downloading from my computer it works !
What can I do ??
Thank you so much !
I’ve tried to re-install with your tuto and, I think I’ve an error.
After ./configure –prefix=/usr from Transmission installation i got:
“Requested libcurl >= 7.16.3 but version of libcurl is 7.15.5.
What can I do in order to get the latest update of libcurl ?
Thanks !!
The new hosting service you’ve posted seems a lot better than burst ever was! That aside, would you be able to write a tutorial on how to install a phproxy or something alike for those public trackers that track ratio via IP? I really hate getting all my ratios to like 50x only to find my reported ratio is still 0.5 lol!
Cheers anyway, quality tut!
you can create a socks5 proxy using ssh through putty so you look like you have the vps ip
my bad replied to wrong person
This tutorial is great. I’ve been using a seedbox with knowin for about 3 weeks now without issues. Downloads and uploads are very fast.
I did have the same problem as theunknown with respect to trackers. All of the torrents I downloaded which gave “tracker did not respond” errors had only two trackers each: tracker.thepiratebay.org, which has been offline for over a year, and tracker.openbittorrent.com which has apparently been experiencing server problems recently. The solution was simply to find torrents using other trackers.
If that is the ultimate solution, I am gonna kill someone
I was trying to reproduce this issue for a long time, because I hear a lot of complaints. I think I should start an FAQ and that would be the answer #1 
Thanks for your contribution.
KnowinServers is a lot slower for SFTP servers than BurstNet for me.
Yes, that is probably because you are in US and the server is in Germany. It is an offshore hosting after all.
Thanks Moltar, everything is setup and working, but about 1/2 of the torrents encounter a problem:
In the Remote GUI General tab on the “Error” field it says:
“Tracker: tracker did not respond”
Then it does not download the torrent.
utorrent has never given me this problem and works on the very same torrents.
Sorry bro have no resolution for this. I have never experienced this. But I do hear this a lot from other users. It’s really strange. If I ever get that, I’ll definitely try to solve it for everyone.
Everythings working fine since one month. But now, when I put a new torrent in my seedbox, it doesn’t start. The download jam at 0%. My other torrents still seed. I’ve tried to restart the transmission deamon, I rebooted the server twice, nothing work !
My bandwith is OK and I can download anything with wget command from the VPS. What should I do ?
Thank’s in advance!
Nevermind… burst.net don’t allow torrent software…
Thanks a lot buddy. Thanks a lot. Kudos.
Just clear my 1 doubt. I had done everything you mentioned in the tutorial. Do i have to update anything after that you mentioned in current tutorial????..
In future if you feel about updating , please make a fresh tutorial.
2) I purchased vps from your affliate link. What about server loads and all this thing. Can you give me words of cautions?
Hi, thanks for the fantastic guide it works a treat.
Now for my request, as I’m not familier with CentOS I have scoured the net looking for a guide to install FlexGet so I can use RSS feeds with transmission.
Now I was wondering if you new how to set this up and could you add a how to, to this guide to further enhance it.
I find downloading directly from the web useful in certain cases, and setting it up is actually really simple since my Centos VPS comes with httpd installed and configured to follow symbolic links (it should be the same for other Knowin VPS’s).
Ignore moltar’s steps of creating a directory for storing downloads.
mkdir /var/www/html/Downloads/
chown -R transmission.transmission /var/www/html/Downloads/
ln -s /var/www/html/Downloads/ /home/transmission/Downloads
chown -R transmission.transmission /home/transmission/Downloads
Then you should be able to access all downloaded torrents from http://yourip/Downloads, but note that anyone can access this without a password if they know your IP and chosen directory name.
Hi,
This is regarding my SFTP connection via our company’s HTTP squid proxy(current version).
Unfortunately, i see this error message “connection closed by remote server”
I have used Filezilla to tunnel the SFTP connection via putty’s dynamic port 23400. This has been set as SOCKS 5 proxy. But my connection has been closed by the remote host.
Please assist immediately.
Keith you could use htdigest to secure your download folder from public access.
I can’t tell you how helpful this has been. Just got my VPS a few hours ago and the majority of the time has been spent trying to install a torrent client/ftp/all the other essentials on the damn thing.
All the guides for CentOS were utter garbage. Then I stumbled across this site and it was, I can say without hesitation, exactly what I was looking for. Seedbox in place in fifteen minutes, and loving Transmission -much better, faster, lighter, prettier than rtorrent or Deluge.
Thank you!!
hey is this setup the same for mac?
No, it is not.
hey i was wondering what client knowing servers uses