I wrote an article about transforming Raspberry Pi into a NAS to share files on a local network with an external usb storage: see technical details there, for brevity here just suppose you’ve a Raspberry PI on local network with a USB drive attached.
Since Raspberry PI has limited resources, my choice go to Transmission daemon. It’s a very light version of Transmission running as a service (daemon) in background. There are different client available, but I use the Web interface:
Using web client, I can start and stop and download torrents within the local network and, if you expose raspberry in the DMZ and use a static IP or a dyndns, from everywhere you are.
Let’s install! On root console, type:
# apt-get install transmission-daemon
Edit the configuration file according to your filesystem:
# nano /var/lib/transmission-daemon/info/settings.json
Change “download-dir” and “incomplete-dir” into different directories on your external usb device, something like /media/MYDRIVE/mydownloaddir and /media/MYDRIVE/myincompletedir.
I also changed:
- “rpc-url”: “/mysecretpath/”
- “rpc-username”: “mysecretuser”
- “rpc-password”: “mypassword” note: this will be hashed at the transmission restart
- “rpc-whitelist”: “127.0.0.1,192.168.*.*,*.*.*.*” warning: copy the *.*.*.* only if you want to expose your Raspberry PI publicly on the Internet.
I leave unchanged:
- “rpc-port”: 9091
Before restarting transmission, copy the configuration file somewhere as a backup copy, because sometimes Transmission overwrite it badly.
Restart transmission:
# service transmission-daemon restart
Now you should reach web interface in this way:
e.g.
http://192.168.0.5:9091/mysecretpath/
or using the host name, for raspbian “raspberrypi”:
Typing username and password you can start to add torrent using the first icon on the left (Open torrent):
Uploading a file from your local filesystem or providing a torrent url from an external service.
Important note: please remember that Raspberry PI has limited resources. Do not start too many torrents at once because hash calculations are cpu intensive.
After you finished download, seed for a while and then clear the completed items (right click to show options) you’ve already downloaded to keep Transmission running smoothly.
See also
