Remotely Control your Torrents on Linux
You have a spare PC lying around or you travel a lot and want to monitor your Bitorrent downloads. Well then what you could do is make yourself a mini seedbox, essentially what a seedbox is a spare computer that you use for torrent downloads now I am going to show you how to create one so that it may be easy for you to monitor your Bittorrent downloads on the go.
First thing’s first we need a torrent client in this case we will be using a modified version of Torrent Flux ( which is a php torrent client) called Torrentflux-b4rt. I choose the modified version because it has more features and also the option to use different back ends. you must be wondering why not just use the uTorrent with its webUI, let me tell you that utorrent webUI has very limited set of features as opposed to TorrentFlux and utorrent webUI cant be accessed from your cellphone if you decide to control it on the go and last but not the least torrentflux is very customizable as you can install plugins and theme to either change the look or to add more features.
Start a full fledged torrent tracker on your PC easily
These days torrent are the most popular file sharing medium, almost everybody downloads stuff off torrents and now imagine you can create a torrent tracker on your own PC easily which also doesn’t uses much resources, well one might wonder the uses of hosting a tracker on one’s own PC, thinking of it one immediately comes to my mind that is if you are using a Internet connection where the local traffic is uncapped then you can start a tracker and start sharing stuff with your fellow local users with higher speeds than your Internet speeds. now if you have found a use for the tracker continue to read the instructions:
This is what you require to start a torrent tracker:
1. Xampp - allows you to start a web server on your PC bundling apache, mysql, file FTP server and SMTP server into an easy to install packages
for Linux you can use lampp but this article only caters windows users
Actually you can install any kind of web script on Xampp/lampp (or any such application) e.g WordPress, phpbb etc
2. Xbtit or Btit (I will be using Xbtit in this guide) - you can get both from btiteam.org
I chose Xbtit because you can easily install plugins for it using the administrative panel
P.S aradi tracker is also powered by Btit tracker software
Step by step guide:
1. download and Install Xampp, during the installer it will give you option to set apache, my SQL and filezilla FTP as system service so they start with the system , do this if you want your server to start with your PC making it available all the time
2. now download Xbtit and extract the files, now copy all the files placed in the Xbtit_xxx folder (xxx is the version number) to the htdocs folder in the Xampp directory (usually C:/Xampp/htdocs) - once you have copied all the files this will replace the original Xampp index.php file which has the redirect code for the configuration page, now everytime you open http://127.0.0.1 in your browser it will open your tracker page, if you want to access your Xampp control panel you will have to visit http://127.0.0.1/xampp in your browser
3. now that you have copied the files correctly open http://127.0.0.1 in your browser and Xampp will present an start page for you which will ask you for your language click on your language and move on
4. now it will show you a page which has many links on the left, click on status to check if everything is working fine, if something shows up as disabled open the Xampp control panel (open it from the Xampp start menu folder) and start that service
5 this is the most important step, make your Xampp installation secure, visit the Xampp security page by clicking the security link on the left side ,Xampp will show you the security problems and the way to fix them, just make sure you remember the phpmyadmin password as you would require it in step no 6 and 11
6. now that everything is working fine, click on the phpmyadmin link on the left side this will open a login page, the default username is root and the password is the phpmyadmin password you set in the previous step once you login it will load a complex looking page, here you need to make a database named tracker, to do that type tracker in the text box below “create new database:” heading and press create
it will show you a message stating “Database tracker has been created.” it means everything went fine
7. now in your browser visit http://127.0.0.1 this will now start the Xbtit installer (much like the WordPress installer)
8. click start and now it will check if everything is ready for the install and will show you the stats , now click next
9. now it will ask you for the database details
details are as follows:
MySQL Server (localhost works ok for most servers): localhost
MySQL Username: root
MySQL Password: put the password that you had set in step no 5
MySQL Database: tracker (we created this in step 5)
MySQL Table Prefix: leave it alone
now click next
10. click next again on the page that shows up now and it will start importing your tables to your database and when it finishes it will show you a message “The database.sql has been imported to your database. ” , click next
11. now it will prompt you for the tracker settings
put in the site name and the site URL and leave everything else as it is ( I have noticed there is a problem with the SMTP server in Xampp that’s why the user validation mode doesn’t works so you will have to use admin validation method or no validation), click next and it will show you a page telling that all setting were saved
12. now it will prompt you to create an owner account so that you can manage your tracker put in the settings and click next and it will give you a success message “Creating Owner Account is done.”
13. you are done with the installation and it will give an installation completed message
now click on go to your tracker link and log in to your tracker and start customizing your tracker by going in your admin panel
Now start uploading torrents and sharing
Note: if you have an dynamic IP use these services so that you don’t have to share your IP with your users every time the IP changes:
