Seeting up transmission web interface

Transmission is a popular bittorrent client that has a very useful web interface. Its ideal when run on an always-on machine such as a home server or an HTPC.

1. Install transmission: sudo apt-get install transmission-daemon

2. Make a start_transmision.sh file and add the following:

sudo service transmission-daemon stop
transmission-daemon -a 192.168.*.* -c ~/torrents-to-download/ --incomplete-dir /tmp/

-a is the list of IPs that are allowed to connect to the web interface
-c is a folder for placing torrents. Torrents placed here are automatically downloaded

3. chmod u+x start_transmision.sh and run

4. Check your IP by running ifconfig

5. Now any machine on the allowed list can connect to the web interface from a browser using the address: yourIP:9091

Setup static ip on Ubuntu Server

Edit /etc/network/interfaces

Change  iface eth0 inet dhcp to
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.200
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255
gateway 192.168.1.1 
dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4


Since most other systems on your network will use dhcp, pick an address that doesn't cause conflict. Most routers will assign small numbers 1st (192.168.1.[1,2,3..]) so pick a big one. Obviously, the rest of the settings need to be change to match your network.

Setting up a home file server

1. Download Ubuntu Server and copy to a usb stick using UNetbootin.

2. Boot your server from the usb stick.

3. The installation is pretty much straightforward. Just select "guided partitioning" and the disk/partition that you want to install to and the installer will do the rest.

4. When prompted for packages to install, select ssh-server and samba.

5. After booting into the new system we need to setup a few things.The 1st is to  set up a static IP so that you can connect to the server from elsewhere using ssh.

6. Next we need to setup samba so that we can share our files.

$ nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Here we can change the workgroup name to match the workgroup name on the machines that will be connecting to the server (WORKGROUP is the Windows 7 default). We also need to specify the folders on the server that will be shared on the network. We do this by adding the following entry at the end of smb.conf:

[public]
comment = Just a comment
path = /path/to/share/point
read only = no
guest only = yes
guest ok = yes

Add one entry per share point and change the path accordingly.

7. Additionally we can install transmission so that our file server can grab torrents.