Build a BitTorrent Box

GRAB YOURSELF SOME storage—an external hard drive, large USB stick, or similar—and hook it up to your Pi, because it’s time to fill it with Linux ISOs and historical artifacts from http://archive.org. Using a Pi as an always-available torrent client makes sense; the protocol is based on sharing and availability, but leaving your main PC ramping up your electricity bill isn’t the right way to go about hosting that data. Run Raspbian, install torrent client Transmission with sudo apt-get

install transmission-daemon , then

immediately stop it with sudo service

transmission-daemon stop , so that we can edit its configuration file. Run

sudo nano /etc/transmission

daemon/settings.json to do so. Find the line that says “rpcwhitelist,” and add a comma after “127.0.0.1” followed by—if your network hands out IP addresses in this range—“192.168.1.*” and tweak that address range if required. Then head to “rpc-authentication-required,” and change its value from “true” to “false.” Exit Nano with Ctrl-X then Y, and run sudo service transmission

daemon start to set Transmission running again. You should now be able to log in to Transmission’s web interface from any machine on your network, by pointing a browser at, for example, 192.168.1.2:9091, switching the IP address for that of your Pi.