FreeNAS is a tiny Open Source FreeBSD-based operating system which provides free Network-Attached Storage. Francois-Xavier Cat. ARCHIVE 2017 (1). For our purposes we’re going to go ahead and install the Full installation of FreeNAS though so we can do some other fun things later.

Hi, on this tutorial I want to show you how to install the latest version of FreeNAS 9.2.1.3 on a server. FreeNAS is a simple, lightweight and powerful Linux distribution for server. It has many features you need to build a powerful server for your network. It comes with a web interface to manage the server remotely. First, make sure you have the latest version of FreeNAS 9.2.1.3. You can grab the ISO file from Next, boot your computer or virtual machine with the ISO. On this tutorial I am installing FreeNAS on VirtualBox on Windows 8 host.

Make sure you have minimum 2 GB of disk space and 1 GB of RAM on the server or VM. Let FreeNAS installer boot the computer until you see the following display on your screen. Select the first option and press Enter. Select the disk in which FreeNAS will be installed. If you have more than one disks, all disks are displayed here. Make sure you select the correct disk.

In this example, I already have previous version of FreeNAS installed. If this is the case, you can select to upgrade or fresh install. Select Fresh Install to perform a new installation and reformat the disk. Confirm the installation Shortly after you choose Yes, the installer will begin installing FreeNAS to the computer.

In a minute the installer finished, press OK and reboot the computer. After reboot you will see the detailed information about your new server. You can access the server using the given address for the web interface displayed on screen.

I’m a huge fan. I can’t imagine why anyone would use anything else, unless there’s something funky the big-name programs can do, that rtorrent just doesn’t handle yet. This time, instead of introducing you to rtorrent nice and easy, with, I’m going to give you a brief tour, and then I’ll show you something very cool you can do with it. Rtorrent is an amazing, complex, powerful program that is at the same time sleek, clean, comprehensive and ultralight — and I’m giving you just one small idea of its potential. But first, let’s scratch the surface. Like a lot of console-driven programs, the startup screen for rtorrent is rather dry.

That’s all you get. Exciting, isn’t it? 🙄 To add a torrent, press return and navigate to the torrent file.

In this example, I’m using one of my favorite albums, “,” from. I can’t guarantee you’ll like it, but it’s a free and legal download and it makes for a good example. You can use tab completion to make your way to it.

Double-tab shows a list of available path options that match the path you’ve already started. Your path starts in your home directory (unless you started it in a lower directory than that), so you don’t have to give it the full root path if you don’t want to. Press enter when you’ve found the one you want, and rtorrent will add it to the list. Note that it’s still labeled as “INACTIVE.” rtorrent won’t start downloading until you tell it to. Use the arrow up and down keys to highlight the torrent (it will be marked with a bar of asterisks) and press CTRL+S.

Now we’re moving. The torrent is marked as active, the tracker will be contacted, and provided there are adequate seeds, downloading will start. That’s about it, in a nutshell. There are some customary points that you’d expect from a torrent client. Press the right arrow while a torrent is highlighted, to see a detailed breakdown of the information available.

To get back to the main list, use the left arrow. Bandwidth throttling might be important to you too. Diginet Site 4 13 Manual Lymphatic Drainage here.

If you’re used to capping your bandwidth (I choke my upload speeds to keep my wireless router from having a nervous breakdown), try using the a-s-d, A-S-D, z-x-c and Z-X-C keys to trim the speed to your liking. If you take a few moments to experiment, you’ll find that pressing the numbers 1-6 gives you a revised view, with different filters applied. That can be useful if you’ve got 10 or 12 torrents running at a time, and you want a clear list of finished torrents, or stopped torrents. And most important, you can quit the program with CTRL+Q. This is where you can stop if you just wanted the short tour. The next part is for people who really want to put rtorrent to work, and don’t mind getting their hands dirty. 😈 When you started rtorrent for the very first time, you probably saw a warning message that told you there wasn’t a.rtorrent.rc file to follow.

That configuration file is what morphs rtorrent from a mild-mannered, law-abiding console gimmick into an unholy torrent-wrangling banshee. In Ubuntu, the sample rtorrent configuration file is hiding at /usr/share/doc/rtorrent/examples/rtorrent.rc. Copy one for your own perusal, and give it the proper hidden file prefix. Cp /usr/share/doc/rtorrent/examples/rtorrent.rc ~/.rtorrent.rc Edit, 2010-05-07: Please remember that this post was written a few years ago, and the configuration file for the current, vanilla rtorrent may be different from what you see here. — K.Mandla Now open that file in your favorite text editor.

Take a minute or two to peruse the guts. (I’ve copied one to the for reference, or if you’re reading this at work on your $3,000 DRM-crippled Vista rig. 😛 ) You should get an idea of what the file can do; setting max uploads and downloads, default throttling and IP masking are all options. But take a closer look at some of these settings.

# Watch a directory for new torrents, and stop those that have been # deleted. #schedule = watch_directory,5,5,load_start=./watch/*.torrent #schedule = untied_directory,5,5,stop_untied= What’s that mean, you say? Well, it means rtorrent can watch a directory and add torrents to its list automatically, and stop torrents if the corresponding file disappears. Now look at this: # Stop torrents when reaching upload ratio in percent, # when also reaching total upload in bytes, or when # reaching final upload ratio in percent. # example: stop at ratio 2.0 with at least 200 MB uploaded, or else ratio 20.0 #schedule = ratio,60,60,stop_on_ratio=200,200M,2000 You can also allow seeding to a specific ratio, a specific total uploaded or both. So if you get tired of carrying the weight of the Internets on your shoulders, you can limit your sharing on any number of criteria.

That’s nothing new, you might say. Azureus does all that, plus it has a feature-rich GUI, is proof of the viability of Java applications and has a cool blue frog as a mascot.

Well, please allow me to retort with a case study: Imagine you’ve got two machines: Your $3,000 dual-core, dual SATA-drive, LED-bespeckled laptop straight from Dell, with an array of glossy sheen snap covers, eight USB ports, a gigabit connection and a built-in 802.11a-wireless card. Your other machine is the lowly 166Mhz Pentium laptop. The one with 64Mb of PC66 and a 3Gb hard drive. The one you got from work in 1997 and never took back, even when you left them for another company during the dot-com boom. Burnt-out pixels, loose hinges and one scratchy speaker. The one with the Stone Temple Pilots sticker peeling off the lid.

You know what I’m talking about. Set up your main rig with a shared network folder ( would be perfect for this) on a static IP address.

Set up your lowly Pentium machine with a hard line to your router, maybe with a PCMCIA LAN card — something that at least gives you decent access speeds. Now mount that shared folder directly into your slave’s home directory, maybe under./watch.

Set up the configuration file. Trigger rtorrent on bootup, and tell it to watch that folder. Now you surf away in the comfort of your shiny dual-core desktop-replacement laptop, and when you find a torrent you like, save it into the local networked folder — perhaps even sending it to that folder automatically, through Firefox’s file extension preferences. When you save it, rtorrent snaps it up and adds it to its list.

It starts downloading it automatically, saving the file locally or perhaps on an external drive. You can set it to follow a certain bandwidth schedule so it doesn’t overwhelm the network, or you could hold all the torrents until the middle of the night, and do all your downloading during the wee hours. It continues to download until it’s finished, then seeds for as long as you allow it. If it reaches the seeding ratio you set, it stops.

If it reaches the upload limit, it stops. And best of all, if you delete the control torrent file out of your local download directory, it halts all the activity on that torrent and subtracts it from the list. Download the torrent, and it starts immediately. Change your mind and delete it, and rtorrent cuts it loose. Clean and neat, all handled automatically and without the least amount of effort on your part.

It’s almost like a torrent daemon. (In my experience, rtorrent never deletes the product files it has already created. So if you start downloading and change your mind an hour later, rtorrent might take the torrent out of the list, but the target files are still available. Conceivably, you could change your mind again and re-download the torrent file, and rtorrent would pick up the already downloaded fraction and get back to work on it. But I’m not 100 percent sure on that because I don’t recall ever doing it, so don’t hold me to that. 🙂 ) I’ll be honest and say I haven’t used Azureus in more than a year, and so it’s possible that you could create the same arrangement with Azureus.

But can Azureus run on your leftover Pentium Pro laptop? Rtorrent is highlighted in yellow in that window.

CPU usage is roughly 1.0 percent of my 300Mhz and the memory profile around 10 percent of my 64Mb, and that’s while it actively downloads the album I started with when I began writing this. Add a few more torrents and of course the profile will go up, but the benefit of running without Java, without the X interface and without two dozen Gnome dependencies should be blatantly obvious.

I’m willing to bet your old Pentium could do it. Spacewise, rtorrent is going to cost you 314Kb for the download and 860Kb to install. Is necessary, so that’s another 284Kb to download and 788Kb on your drive, so you’re looking at less than 600Kb of bandwidth and maybe 1.6Mb installed. Again, I’ve written letters to Mom that took up more space than that.

I hope this is convincing enough to get you to try rtorrent, and maybe even use it on a regular basis. I really believe it’s a better option than most of the prevailing torrent clients, even if it is console-based. If you want to delve even deeper into this amazing little program, take a spin past the, which is one of the best-composed and best-written I’ve seen in a long time. The project is very active, and it has the look of it. Next time: Give up on the Gecko, and browse with instead. Edit, 2008-02-14: has been kind enough to translate this howto into Spanish; it’s on his blog.

Please remember that my blog is GFDL 1.2, which means you’re free to use or translate this post as you like, so long as you redistribute the content with the same license, or a later version. For more details, see my. Edit, 2008-08-04: If you’d like to see a working example and configuration files for the systems I described here, take a look. Edit, 2009-01-23: If you’d like to see this setup on exceptionally low-end hardware, consider.

Even at 100Mhz with only 16Mb for system memory and a lethargic 810Mb hard drive, it’s possible to use rtorrent in a networked arrangement and feed it the work of downloading and seeding. Edit, 2009-11-14: This post is more than two years old now, but is still one of the heaviest draws to this site. I had to re-upload photos for this page, and likewise had to edit the text slightly to make sure what you saw in the pictures was what you were reading in the text. My apologies if I overlooked any discrepancies. Cheers and enjoy.

Edit, 2010-05-07: It’s ironic that almost exactly on the third birthday of this post, a second image host has expired and I’ve had to reupload the images again. I suppose it’s a testimonial to either this post or to rtorrent (or maybe Revolution Void), take your pick. 😉 Once again, if you see something different from what’s in the pictures, please let me know. It might be around for a couple more years still. 😯 P.S., 2010-05-07: Just for the record, the screenshots that you see currently are of the package available in Arch’s AUR. The system is a running only framebuffer applications on Arch Linux, writing downloads directly over USB1.1 to an external hard drive, accessed across a wireless network with ssh and nfs, and managed by a 120Mhz Pentium laptop running Crux.

This is the part where you try to out-geek me. ↓ • rtorrent runs now on my sheevaplug (a plugcomputer), I am controlling it via wtorrent, a web-frontend. The sheevaplug is very nice 🙂 it is really something from the future and only for 100$ Marvell-SoC Kirkwood 6281 with 1,2 GHz 512 MB RAM and 512 MB Flash-Memory – with USB slot and SD slot I am running it with ubuntu 9.04 and rtorrent is perfect for its lightweight – wtorrent was quiet a hassel to install though since I wanted to use lighttpd, but it worked out # one questions remains with rtorrent – how is the port forwarding managed in regard to NAT on a DSL-router. In the.rtorrent.rc there is a port-range to uncomment but I am unsure if it has to be a range and not only one port like in azureus. Maybe somebody can shed some light on it.

↓ • Pingback: • Hi there, I have a weird problem with rtorrent. The throttle is off (or set to 300/40). I’m connected to internet with a 3 Mbps connection so I get download transfers up to 360 KB per second. Unfortunately in rtorrent (and only there) I cannot get a download rate faster than 60 KB/s. The download speed is always balancing between 55 and 59.5 KB/s. It’s very annoying. I thought about the throttle so I set it to 300/40 KB/s and nothing changed.

Then I thought about the default config, so I have copied it from /usr/ and nothing changed. Rtorrent runs on my second computer (Ubuntu 7.04). Both computers are connected to the internet by a D-Link DI-524 Router, but I haven’t been downloading anything on the first computer while testing rtorrent on the second one. Please, help my in any way.

Give me a hint or something. I like rtorrent and I wan’t to keep it, but I cannot live on those speeds. For the same reason, I have uninstalled torrentflux earlier (also problems with download rate). But, for example Azureus speeds very nice. Thanks for any help. Best regards, Nikodem Osmialowski. ↓ • Pingback: • Pingback: • Pingback: • anandus I don’t know if anybody cares, but I’ve got rtorrent running on my external harddisk!

It’s a Western Digital My Book world edition, and now it works fine as a download machine! It’s an ARM-processor (apparently 50 times slower than a P3) with 32Mb, but rtorrent does a good job! (Although, I might use ntorrent to connect to it on my Ubuntu desktop machine, because I’m a lazy GUI-man 😛 ) But I’m very happy with the minimal footprint and the great performance of rtorrent!

Like a pro 😉. ↓ • This is the best rtorrent tutorial I have come across, giving me everything I want, without too many details. I just have one small problem. I set rtorrent to use torrent files automatically from one folder, and use a default location to download. However, once the download occurs, I want to categorize it in separate folders (Music,Movies.etc).

If I do this, I have to stop seeding the file, and delete the torrent, else rtorrent will download it all over again. So how do I change the download folder of a currently downloading file? I tried Ctrl-D which stops the download, but the torrent status is [OPEN]Inactive. If you do Ctrl-O, it says changing path of Open file. Any suggestions? ↓ • Pingback: • kameleon This is just totally awesome.

Where you say “(In my experience, rtorrent never deletes the product files it has already created. So if you start downloading and change your mind an hour later, rtorrent might take the torrent out of the list, but the target files are still available.

Conceivably, you could change your mind again and re-download the torrent file, and rtorrent would pick up the already downloaded fraction and get back to work on it. But I’m not 100 percent sure on that because I don’t recall ever doing it, so don’t hold me to that. 🙂 )” I can attest that it will resume. I started a download on one machine and decided to move my entire rtorrent setup to my server. I just copied over the files my main machine had downloaded and transfered over the.torrent file It picked up where it left off after a quick hash check. Although I too deleted a file but it still shows [OPEN].

↓ • the2ndHare vedang: Try Ctrl+K, it changes a torrent state to [CLOSED]. To all of you, who are desperate to make torrents stop once they have completed downloading + move the files automatically — this is where you look: A couple of questions for all Debian-NSLU2-torrenters (well, and others too): 1.

The hashing is terribly slow, and it happens *every* time you start rtorrent, even if you have your session saved, and ended the program correctly. Is there a way to speed/skip hashing? There are these advanced settings like hash_read_ahead etc. I`m just a bit afraid to use them blindly for that might cause memory/processor stress 2. How does rtorrent consume RAM? It looks like NSLU2 runs out of memory every like 24-26 hours and kills the screen and rtorrent processes. What can be done to prevent this behavior?

The above two problems currently result in terrible performance, because ¹as rtorrent is started it begins hashing for hours, then eventually uses up all RAM, gets killed, goto¹. Thanks in advance for all the answers, and many thanks for this great article! ↓ • nobody the2ndHare: I had the same problem as you with rTorrent crashing (“HandshakeManager::receive_succeeded()” error), with Debian Testing (Lenny). RTorrent was running fine in Debian Stable (etch), but it was a very old version. I search around google and rTorrent website, seems like this is a known problem: Most websites suggest compiling your own, with the correct boot flag. At the end of Ticket #841, someone posted a website of compiled version of rTorrent. I have been using that and have no problem so far.

↓ • Recent version of rtorrent have a “session = /dir” parameter. If you use it, once a hash is fully performed it will write some data to the session dir which will allow it to skip hashing the same pieces next time. Crashing, especially on devices with small amounts of RAM, can be related to RAM running out. Rtorrent seems to use a lot extra memory during hashes, especially on large torrents. On Linux-enabled routers that are capable of adding extra storage via USB (rack HDD, flash stick) make sure you create and enable a swap partition of at least 64-128 MB (I have 512 MB, just in case). It may help fix this problem. ↓ • Pingback: • pa rtorrent is great.

I tried the various webui’s but have finally just settled on using the client itself through ssh/screen. I have one problem with the watch folder. When I stop a torrent in rtorrent (^d). It is immediately reactivated becuase its.torrent file is still in the watch folder. Is there a solution to this? Also, I would like rtorrent to stop deleting files from my watch folder when I remove them from rtorrent.

Why can’t it just move them, or rename them.removed? I cannot figure out how to use view_add, which I assume would add some organizational functionality, labeling and sorting torrents. It would be nice, when using the “move completed torrents to a new location” scheme, if rTorrent could first hash check the FINAL destination, in case you just want to seed something you already have.

Lastly, how about appending “.incomplete” to files that are incomplete, instead of moving them at the end? UTorrent has this feature. ↓ • “””Your other machine is the lowly 166Mhz Pentium laptop. The one with 64Mb of PC66 and a 3Gb hard drive. The one you got from work in 1997 and never took back, even when you left them for another company during the dot-com boom. Burnt-out pixels, loose hinges and one scratchy speaker. The one with the Stone Temple Pilots sticker peeling off the lid.

You know what I’m talking about. “”” Ha Ha Ha, that got a giggle out of me. There must be a lot of old stolen laptops around like this.

By the way, great guide on what to do with old hardware. ↓ • Pingback: • Pingback: • Pingback: • anonymous_coward Hi all. Download God Of War 3 For Pc Setup more. I know only the very basics of bash (i.e. I am hopeless at writing ANY scripts). Currently I am using this: 1. I put my.torrent files in “torrents/”.

Find./torrents -name “*.torrent” while read i; do cp “$i” watch && sleep 12h && date; done (Torrent files will be copied from “torrents/” to “watch/” at intervals of 12 hours. “date” displays the time of day so you can keep track.) 3. Edit the default “.rtorrent.rc” file. Look for these 2 lines: #schedule = watch_directory,5,5,load_start=./watch/*.torrent #schedule = untied_directory,5,5,stop_untied= Change to: schedule = watch_directory,60,60,load_start=./watch/*.torrent schedule = untied_directory,60,60,stop_untied=./watch/*.torrent (The numbers are in seconds. 60 secs should be frequent enough?) (“watch_directory” and “load_start” are self-explanatory. “untied_directory” and “stop_untied”: stop a torrent if its torrent file is deleted [untied].) Lastly, look for this line: #schedule = ratio,60,60,stop_on_ratio=200,200M,2000 Change to: schedule = ratio,60,60,stop_on_ratio=100 (Stop at the minimum 1:1 ratio.

Can be increased if you want to be generous.). ↓ • Can somebody help me? I love rtorrent too. I have it running on an old laptop from midnight to 8am (off peak).

It monitors a directory for.torrent files, and when it has finished downloading one it copies the file to a ‘completed’ directory, and deletes the original.torrent. The only thing is, it keeps the.torrent it has created in the session directory, and therefore never drops any torrent from its list. I’m assuming there’s something I can put in the.rtorrent.rc file to make it remove them on completion, but I have no idea what it might be. ↓ • Empty This was a really terrible post.

You’re basically saying that rtorrent is the most awesome torrent client out there, but this “banshee” that you tried to show us is quite unconvincing. If people would just stop praising rtorrent for a second, holding it to be the BitTorrent messiah, maybe someone would come up with a better curses-based torrent client for Linux one day. Rtorrent is outdated, legacy, and the only reason that newbies like yourself love it so much is because it feels oh-so-Linux and wow-an-rc-file. “I can’t imagine why anyone would use anything else, unless there’s something funky the big-name programs can do, that rtorrent just doesn’t handle yet.” How about labels for torrents? Oh, rtorrent can’t do that? Hm, well Then how about setting specific “ratio limits” per-torrent?

No, not that either, eh? Rtorrent sucks and it’s for the better if the rest of you would just realise that sometime soon. ↓ • meliral Well said, sirrah. No, seriously, “x sucks, someone should make a version that does y” messages get on my nerves. If someone wants something done/added to something, they should either do it themselves or, if they can’t (which is not unreasonable) then they can damn well ASK NICELY! And anyway, if you manage your file names and directory tree properly, you won’t need labels, and why would you need a specific ratio limit for a given torrent?

Even if you needed to seed one beyond the others, for instance, you could always, for example, run another instance using a different config file (because it loads the whole re file at startup, you could feasibly write a script that opens multiple instances, swapping in different.rtorrent.rc’s in between) and give it a different max ratio and a different watch folder, where you put that “special” torrent. OK, it’d be a kludge, but it would _work_. ↓ • Pingback: • aag I have another way to use rtorrent. I have an Asus router flashed with DD-WRT firmware. The router has 2 USB drives, so, you just have to install rtorrent in the router, plug a USB hard drive and that little box will download files for you all day. You can claim that you can do that with a Western Digital My Book (as anandus said before) and you don’t have to care about two boxes.

Well, with a flashed router like mine (or other DD-WRT flashable) you can go even further, you can also install an emule, ares, gnutella, fastrack and some others P2P clients within the same box. ↓ • Anthony G Empty’s comment is kind of funny. The author of this article and many of the commentators listed many good solid reasons for using rtorrent. Nobody mentioned the ability to use a.rc file for storing configuration information as being a particular plus.

That’s just standard practice. Empty also provides no evidence for their claim that it’s “outdated, legacy” (often synonymous in any case). As someone using GNU/Linux for close to 10 years, I’ve found rtorrent to be the best client available that meets my needs (KTorrent was my second favourite). The only two missing features, Empty mentions is torrent labels and per torrent ratios.

I’m generally seeding about 40 torrents at any one time and I’ve never needed labels. My default ratio is set to 1:1 which I use whenever I obtain a torrent from a public tracker.

For torrents from private trackers, I simply tell rtorrent to ignore the ratio setting for those individual torrents – as I generally want to leave those torrents seeding for as long as I still have the relevant files on my system. ↓ • Kristian Z I’d like to use rtorrent, but the lack of labels and sorting of downloads into separate directories is a deal-breaker. I just can’t have movies and apps and music all in the same folder, it would be a mess. Ideally rtorrent would auto start a torrent in the watched directory (which it does), add a label automatically by matching tracker URL to a regexp (which it does not), and use that label to sort the download into a purpose-designated directory (which it does not).

It bugs me that no torrent client can do that. It would demand nearly no attention and maintenance. Just put.torrent files in a directory, and downloads would start and be sorted into directories automatically. ↓ • Anthony G The feature proposed by Kristian Z would be very cool alright and I agree it would be nice to be able to give rtorrent the option of storing different torrents in different directories. What I currently do is stop (pause) a torrent after it has fully downloaded, then move the data to the relevant folder / partition depending on the type of data, and then create a symbolic (soft) link in the torrent download directory pointing to the new location. I can then resume the torrent to leave it seeding for as long as I like while having all the music in one set of directories, a latest GNU/Linux distro in the default download directory and video files in another directory.

It takes a little bit of extra time and the download directory can get crowded but that doesn’t bother me too much. I just have to remember to delete the symlink if / when I decide to stop seeding a torrent. ↓ • Pingback: • Empty Hello. Anthony: I’ll start off by telling you what I mean when I say rtorrent is outdated. Back in the days there were nearly no private trackers which kept track of a single user’s “ratio”. Back in the days, you’d just seed as much as you felt like and then stop (or not), because no one could tell you to seed this or that much. Nowadays, there’s an abundance of private trackers which *do* keep track of single users, probably even more private trackers than public ones.

For this reason some people with not-that-great Internet connections need to be able to easily decide which torrents they want to keep seeding and which torrents they want to stop as soon as they have been downloaded. If rtorrent provided this functionality as a manual chore, I wouldn’t be dissing it that hard.

But rtorrent doesn’t. Absolutely terrible. For this reason only, one should conclude that this is a terrible, terrible client. Every single major BitTorrent client out there provides support for labels, except for rtorrent. I’m a member at a tracker which provides music, lots of it actually, and I keep every single album that I download seeding, because ratio is a bitch there. At one point I had 300 albums seeding which in rtorrent would of course clutter up the views *completely*. There simply is no functionality for filtering out which torrents you would like to see, neither by tracker (as far as I know) nor by “label”.

And even if you could filter by tracker, that still wouldn’t help, because lots of people STILL need labels. I still claim that rtorrent is an absolutely horrible BitTorrent client and shouldn’t be used by anyone who doesn’t desperately need to be able to screen their clients, because that’s honestly pretty much everything that’s good about rtorrent. ↓ • Takla I agree to some extent with Empty. He isn’t a troll and has some coherent points to make about the deficiencies of rtorrent. I run rtorrent on a Linksys NSLU2 (slug) running Debian Lenny.

Rtorrent is the single most unstable console-only application I’ve ever used. Here’s an example of the kind of thing that makes it, finally, unviable: the version in Lenny is a little old, as is normal in a distro. There is a bug where if you choose to have the completed torrents moved to a different folder you cannot stop rtorrent hashing them all over again, despite this config being supported and enabled. On a powerful desktop this would be an inconvenience but on an embedded device with limited CPU resources it’s a showstopper. The bug is known but no fix or patch is available for the version. The advice, as always, is to upgrade to the newest version. To compile on a powerful machine is easy.

To compile on embedded is simply unrealistic. To cross compile for armel (the architecture of NSLU2) on amd64 (my desktop) is so full of pitfalls that it’s essentially impossible. So finally the latest version arrives packaged in Debian experimental. I install it and the bug is gone. But there is a new one in the way it interacts with curl which causes it to seg fault. Guess what is the advice from rtorrent bug reports: upgrade to latest version of curland so on and so on forever amen. And btw the reason for needing to move completed torrents is because there are no damn labels to keep stuff organised and manageable!

Rtorrent appears to be brilliant mostly because, like Empty mentioned, *there are no realistic alternatives for use with screen* so for people who need access via screen there isn’t an alternative. And of course it appeals to all the people out there who think console apps are automatically better than GUI apps and get religious about it. I run headless and desktop machines and there are some terrible console apps as well as many great ones, just like with GUI apps.

I’ve reached the point where I’m having to move all my torrents to a desktop to be managed with deluge. It’s an excellent client but there goes my savings on the electric bill, going from a 10 watt device to one that uses many times that. Meanwhile the nslu2 now runs amule, rock solid, mature, great interface. It’s not a torrent client, which is what I’d like, but it is totally stable which surely is the first requirement of any application and doubly so for anything which is run remotely.

Being kewl is not enough. ↓ • Fedorak Well, Transmission keeps crashing, so I needed another torrent client and I decided to use rtorrent. The documentation could be better. Maybe they could just use this article in the main site? Anyway, it works, it hasn’t crashed and its pretty simple and clean.

Speeds are great and since I only DL one, maybe 3 things at a time its perfect. Stays out of the way and doesn’t seem to hog any resources.

Lots of haters. They make some interesting points, but if they don’t like rtorrent then don’t use it.

Thats the Beauty of free software, we can all like what we want and do our own thing. No need to be a hater. Critique when relevant, but don’t be lame and stir up your bad karma dudes 🙂 Also I never knew about mtop. Thanks for writing this informational and very helpful article.

↓ • Hey guys. I love rTorrent. It works, and has been on for days/weeks and not even a flutter from it. Its fast and connectable. Im using the latest build though.

RTorrent does support labels in its own goofy way and does in fact watch for directories and download to custom directories. It can even be set to delete stuff once things are finished. RTorrent is evolving and extremely customizable.

The console/terminal aspect of it, quickly makes many brains go into #$!@#% mode, but the truth is, it is actually quite beastly in features. I’ll say however, learning it is not for the faint of heart. Mostly for people who are used to computers and don’t mind living in the console. All the excess gui being ripped off makes it one hella fast client. ↓ • intent Heres an easy way to implement the ability to download your stuff into specific directories. First off you start by creating the catagories (directories) you wish to sort by in a watch/ directory. Then create the same set of directories in a finished/ directory.

Finally create a different watch_directory entry for each of these watch directories, being sure to set ‘d.set_custom1’ to the finished directories you created for each of these catagories. The following on_finished command will make sure that your downloads are moved to the custom1 directory you set. Schedule = watch_directory_1,10,10,”load_start=~/Download/watch/Apps/*.torrent,d.set_custom1=~/Download/finished/Apps/” schedule = watch_directory_2,10,10,”load_start=~/Download/watch/Movies/*.torrent,d.set_custom1=~/Download/finished/Movies/” on_finished = move_complete,”d.set_directory=$d.get_custom1=;execute=mv,-u,$d.get_base_path=,$d.get_custom1=” (the important part here is the d.set_custom1 in the watch_directory directive.) For those who want to whine about what rtorrent doesn’t do, why not write a patch and submit it to the author(s) of rtorrent? Don’t have the ability to do it?, then maybe you should suggest it politely to someone who can.

↓ • Tundro Walker This is just what I needed! I decided to turn the old, hacked i-opener I’ve been farting around into a torrent slave to farm out Ubuntu.iso’s. Been doing command-line only, and experimenting with Bittorrent’s CLI. Not only did it suck up ~50% of the CPU & Ram while running, but it crapped out before the files were even 10% d/l’ed. I finally “gave in” to using rtorrent held off, because frankly it seemed pretty complex at first glance.

I’ve been using it for a while and it’s been flying great. HOWEVER, it’s not re-seeding or uploading; it’s just leaching. I stumbled across your post trying to sort that out, and the rtorrent.rc file is exactly what I needed. I happen to also have an old 166mhz Omnibook 800CT, 32mb ram, 2gb HDD. Think I’ll do the same with it.

Except take it to work so it’s sucking up “The Man’s” power and internet connection while torrenting. Your trick on making a torrent slave out of these things really goes the extra mile and makes them REAL torrent slaves park them off to the side and have them baby-sit that shared folder.

↓ • As mentioned, check out “screen” – open terminal (if on Ubuntu/Debian “apt-get install screen”) – “screen -S rtorrent”: create a new screen session, label it ‘rtorrent’ – you’ll already be connected to this new screen’s session – execute “rtorrent” to load, then “Ctrl+A”, then “D” (this will detach you back to shell/cli – type “screen -ls” to view your “Detached” sessions – type “screen -r rtorrent” to reconnect back, *like you never left!* Combine w/ SSH & track your downloads fr anywhere! A couple tutorials. ↓ • Pingback: • Pingback: • Xmamx Rtorrent not seeding or Rtorrent not seeding completed downloads. Just for those people who are having this problem, i found this section in my.rtorrent.rc file that was deleting the *.torrent from the watch directory once the download was complete (therefore not seeding as i could not find the torrent file). This is the section below: # Move completed downloads on_finished = rm_torrent,”execute=rm,$d.get_tied_to_file=” on_finished = move_complete,”execute=mv,-u,$d.get_base_path=,/media/fileserver/torrents/Finished/;d.set_directory=/media/fileserver/torrents/Finished/” Remove the line: on_finished = rm_torrent,”execute=rm,$d.get_tied_to_file=” I used and automatic installer script to install wtorrent and rtorrent and this setting was automatically loaded. Hope this helps someone as this problem has annoyed me for a couple of days. Cheers, Xmamx.

↓ • Pingback: • Pingback: • Pingback: • Pingback: • Here’s my rig: A linksys NSLU2 hacked with debian on it (£50 from ebay) 150TB WD hard drive (present from an old employer) NFS set up and SSH as well so I can access it either in or outside of my network. Rtorrent set up as per these instructions (using screen so I can detach and resume the sessions over ssh) This means that I can have my (obviously legal) torrents running 24/7 without having to have a full fat computer on. I can also lot in via ssh (from linux or even windows with winscp) when I am away from home and drop torrent trackers into the watch folder so they start downloading.

Freakin’ sweet, guys. Thanks for posting this.

Cli bt clients – an evaluation rtorrent transmission-cli transmission-daemon transmission-remote bittorrent-console (old original python client) and some other more obscure cli clients not worth mentioning evaluate on two factors only, with default settings: 1. Memory+cpu usage 2.

# of peer connections made+download speeds my results: transmission-daemon won bittorrent console lost on memory usage rtorrent lost on # of peers + speed your results may differ. I will still try any new cli bt client. There is still much room for improvement. ↓ • John Hi, thanks very much for your smart tutorial! Alas, I’ve been using rtorrent for more than one year, and I have two serious problems: 1) Often rtorrent does not respond to any keystrokes 2) Often rtorrent crashes without a cause.

Believe it or not – these are my problems. I’m using all the time the current Ubuntu version. Well, I guess, you’re are not prepared to accept my description – so, let that pass.

But I have a question: Let’s suppose I’d like to download 20 torrents: Torrent-1, Torrent-2 and so on. I want to have rtorrent to use a kind of job list with these torrents – but downloading only (say) 8 torrents at the same time: say Torrent-1 to Torrent-8. If one of these torrents is complete (say Torrent-3) rtorrent starts to download Torrent-9, so it is still downloading 8 torrents.

If the next torrent is complete (say Torrent-7) rtorrent starts to download the next Torrent-10. Is rtorrent able to manage that kind of batch job? How do I have to configure rtorrent to behave in that way? If you are familiar with torrent clients you know that vuze or deluge are able to do these things. But what about rtorrent? Greetz by John 😉.

↓ • Pingback: • Pingback: • JP Senior I figure somebody might make use of a working rtorrentrc that works behind packeteers with encryption. I’ve been rocking rtorrent since it was released, and a simple config works for me.

My router DNATs ports 28533 for DHT and a small port range for regular bittorrent data. 172.16.60.5 is the IP address of my internal server. I don’t know how rtorrent deals with the tos byte so assuming 00100000 for IP Precedence 1, on my network is ‘bulk traffic’, tos maps out to ’32’. (For linux ISOs only!) ~/.rtorrent.rc: encryption = allow_incoming,try_outgoing,enable_retry dht = auto dht_port = 28533 port_range = 0 ip = 203.0.113.53 bind = 172.16.60.5 directory = /home/user/download upload_rate = 50 tos = 32 session = /home/user/download/torrent. ↓ • Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Q typically are mapped to the tty “stop” and “start” signals (pause output and unpause output); in order to make them available to “rtorrent”, you have to unset them first via: “stty start undef stop undef”.

Another note: even when ^S and ^Q are available to “rtorrent”, and the torrent is inactive, before pressing ^S to start it I have to press ^K (stop torrent) first; I don’t know why. Here is my own “start_rtorrent” script. Note that I don’t use “screen” in this case, I use “dtach”; if there is no socket named “/tmp/rtorrent_session”, “dtach” starts it; if there is one, then “dtach” connects to the running session. “dtach” is a lighter (i.e.

No multi-windows which suits me fine in this case) version of “screen”. Stty start undef stop undef cd ~/downloads/torrents exec dtach -A /tmp/rtorrent_session -Ez rtorrent. ↓ • Pingback: • Pingback: • Pingback: • Pkwok Hi, I need some help with DHT. I’m running Lenny Debian on nslu2. I did apt-get update rtorrent. But I still get the below error. NAS:~# rtorrent rtorrent: Error in option file: ~/.rtorrent.rc:86: Command “dht” does not exist.

I wonder if the rtorrent is too old to support dht. Is there a way to tell the version? How do I get the latest Debian rtorrent? # This is an example resource file for rTorrent.

Copy to # ~/.rtorrent.rc and enable/modify the options as needed. Remember to # uncomment the options you wish to enable. # Maximum and minimum number of peers to connect to per torrent.

Min_peers = 40 max_peers = 400 # Same as above but for seeding completed torrents (-1 = same as downloading) #min_peers_seed = 10 #max_peers_seed = 50 # Maximum number of simultanious uploads per torrent. #max_uploads = 10 # Global upload and download rate in KiB. “0” for unlimited. Download_rate = 0 upload_rate = 20 # Default directory to save the downloaded torrents.

Directory = /usbExt/torrent # Default session directory. Make sure you don’t run multiple instance # of rtorrent using the same session directory. Perhaps using a # relative path? #session =./session session = /usbExt/torrent # Watch a directory for new torrents, and stop those that have been # deleted. #schedule = watch_directory,5,5,load_start=./watch/*.torrent #schedule = untied_directory,5,5,stop_untied= schedule = watch_directory,5,5,load_start=/usbExt/torrent/*.torrent schedule = untied_directory,5,5,stop_untied=/usbExt/torrent/*.torrent # Close torrents when diskspace is low. #schedule = low_diskspace,5,60,close_low_diskspace=100M # Stop torrents when reaching upload ratio in percent, # when also reaching total upload in bytes, or when # reaching final upload ratio in percent. # example: stop at ratio 2.0 with at least 200 MB uploaded, or else ratio 20.0 schedule = ratio,60,60,”stop_on_ratio=200,50M,300″ # The ip address reported to the tracker.

#ip = 127.0.0.1 #ip = rakshasa.no # The ip address the listening socket and outgoing connections is # bound to. #bind = 127.0.0.1 #bind = rakshasa.no # Port range to use for listening.

Port_range = 0 # Start opening ports at a random position within the port range. Port_random = no # Check hash for finished torrents.

Might be usefull until the bug is # fixed that causes lack of diskspace not to be properly reported. #check_hash = no # Set whetever the client should try to connect to UDP trackers. Use_udp_trackers = yes # Alternative calls to bind and ip that should handle dynamic ip’s.

↓ • Excellent guide, congratulations! I have one question that was already asked above (by ibob)but never answered, so I figured I could try once more.

Let’s say I have a torrent with 20 files and I choose to download only one of them. I set everything else to off and rtorrent downloads the one I selected. However, when I look into the destination directory, I see all the files with their proper size (filled with zeros). Now I understand that it needs to pre-allocate the space for the download, but is there a way to do it only for the files I select?