Three Wise Men

Image via Wikipedia

File sharing has a long history and I will start with the time when I first got into it. At that time I was using ZX Spectrum 48k and games were distributed mostly on magnetic tapes packed in plastic boxes more commonly known as compact cassettes¹.

Twenty years ago, give or take a few, violation of copyrights² wasn’t really a big issue in a country behind the iron curtain. Getting a new game involved borrowing the tape from a friend, going back home and copying that tape with a double cassette recorder that supported high-speed dubbing.

The other a more sophisticated way of getting a game was to tune your FM radio to a certain local radio station. Then you had to put a blank tape in a cassette recorder and press Record when they started airing the games³. Yes, the local radio station was in fact airing all sorts of ZX Spectrum games and you were able to record them on tape. This was the first method of file sharing that I encountered and by today this is the only one that is limited only by the range and not by the bandwidth. A billion clients can connect at the same time and perform a download.

Read on if you want to know more on how to set up the best BitTorrent client in the Galaxy. ;)

Many years later, in 2001, BitTorrent protocol was published and introduced to the public. Soon it became mainstream and de-facto standard for peer-to-peer file sharing. There are many BitTorrent clients available for many different platforms and picking your favorite might be a bit tricky. Here is the list of requirements and features that my client must have:

• bandwidth limiter
• download queue
• upload of .torrent files from local disk or remote locations (http)
• ability to run on a headless server
• ability to access it from remote locations, when you’re not at home
• immune to reboots

My setup consists of a media server – a computer that serves files to media clients. In my case the most commonly used media client is Playstation 3 and then VLC player on my workstation. I don’t want to perform downloads on my workstation since I reboot to GamingOS time to time and turn my workstation into a gaming station. After some consideration the only viable solution was a web-based torrent client. My media server is running Ubuntu Server and PS3 Media Server is used for serving files to Playstation 3.

TorrentFlux satisfied all the requirements and installation in Ubuntu is pretty simple.

$ sudo apt-get install torrentflux

You might prefer aptitude over apt-get, but the procedure is pretty much the same. You don’t have to worry about the requirements since apt will take care of everything. If you didn’t have MySQL installed then you will be prompted to create an administrator account. After that you will need to configure TorrentFlux. First you have to give TorrentFlux access to your database so that it can create MySQL username and prepare necessary database tables. Then you will be asked for default TorrentFlux username and password.

After that simply point your browser to http://yourmediaserver/torrentflux/ and you should be able to log in and review the settings. Make sure that paths for .torrent files and downloaded files are correct and that you have enough of disk space. If you did a standard install then all the lights in the settings should be green and you are ready to go.

Happy file sharing.