Transmission

Transmission is an excellent Peer-to-peer BitTorrent client for downloading and sharing large files such as Linux ISO's or mixes.

ReadyNAS Add-ons are available to ease the process of installing Transmission. The stable release is for 2.11 but more up-to-date versions are available in beta for 2.21 as of writing (check for more recent updates as I may not update this page every time a new release is made).

• Choose which version you wish to install (I'd recommend the most recent, even if its not marked as stable as this refers to its stability as a ReadyNAS package and not the underlying stability).
• Follow the simple instructions for installing Frontview Add-ons.
• Start Transmission by going to Services → Installed Add-ons and selecting the tick-box to enable Transmission.
• Point your browser at http://[yourroutersip]:8181/transmission/web/ and your ready to go, downloads will be to /c/media/BitTorrent.

Its wise to change a few things from the default installation, the most common is that of the username and password which should never be left as the default on any system/software. To make changes you need to be able to SSH into your box in order to edit the configuration file /c/addons-config/Transmission/transmission-daemon/settings.json, and as per the instructions you must stop the Transmission client from the Frontview page before making these changes.

Username and password are defined in the settings.json file, but they are also used in the startup (transtart.sh), stop (transtop.sh) and blocklist (blocklist.sh) scripts, so all of these have to match in order for Transmission to work correctly.

• SSH to your readynas and su to root.
• cd /c/addons-config/Transmission to get to the directory with the configuration files.
• Edit transmission-daemon/settings.json and change the “rpc-username”: “admin”, line to that of the user account you created and the “rpc-password”: “{askldq34924jOIASklas”, to a password of your choice, save and exit the text-editor (NB - This should be plain-text as you wish to type it, Transmission will when its restarted recognise this as being plain-text and will encode it to a hash and replace it, so you will not see your password again in this file unless you change it).
• Now edit the start-up and stop scripts transtart.sh and transtop.sh to have the new username and password and save these.
• Finally add the TRANSOPT=“ localhost:8181 -n [username]:[password]” line to the blocklist.sh file.
• You can now re-start Transmission from the Frontview page and use your new username and password.

There are various ways in which you can limit torrents, you can set the total upload bandwidth to not exceed a certain threshold, or you can set each individual torrent to have a ratio limit (the default is 2). As with username/password these are set/modified by changing the entries in settings.json. Full details of the configuration options are here.

One of the nice things about running Transmission is that its very simple to access and manage your torrents from anywhere in the world, all you need to do is tell your router to do Port forwarding for the relevant port (default is 8181) to your ReadyNAS. This will vary greatly depending upon the router that you have so I can not possibly begin to describe all possible options as I only own one particular model of router. Instead read how to port forward and ensure that you are forwarding port 8181 to the IP address of your router (which will depend on your home network setup, but you should be able to check this from the list of attached devices in the configuration/setup page of your router). Once done you can access your Transmission WebUI from anywhere by pointing your browser at the IP address assigned by your ISP (e.g. http://123.456.789.1) and specifying the relevant port and path (i.e. http://123.456.789.1:8181/transmission/web/).

Many people, myself now included, have a limit on their data usage from their ISP (it generally makes for a cheaper subscription), but at the same time there are often periods, usually during the night, where the limits do not apply. So rather than having your torrents seeding/leeching 24/7 you can save some of your bandwidth and schedule Transmission to start and stop automatically using cron.

SSH to your ReadyNAS and su to root then add the following lines to crontab (by calling crontab -e)…

00		08	*	*	*		killall transmission-daemon
00		00	*	*	*		/usr/local/bin/transmission-daemon 

…this will kill the transmission-daemon at 08:00 in the morning and start it again at midnight every day. Adjust the times as required.

Assuming you have setup port-forwarding on your router, you should be able to use Transmission Remote for Android to access and manage your torrents from your Android Phone.

• Transmission Home
• Transmission WebUI Configuration
• ReadyNAS Transmission 2.11
• ReadyNAS Transmission 2.21
• Transmission Remote for Android

readynas transmission p2p torrents