Installing a BitTorrent client on the Pogoplug

The Pogoplug can be turned into a dedicated BitTorrent client by following the steps below.


1. PREREQUISITES
As a prerequisite of this article, please complete the steps described in my previous post here in order to prepare your Pogoplug so you can install packages using the IPKG package management system.


2. INSTALLING THE BITTORRENT PACKAGE
To install the Transmission BitTorrent client, SSH to your Pogoplug and perform the following:

# install transmission
/opt/bin/ipkg install transmission
# start transmission in order to generate a default configuration file
/opt/bin/transmission-daemon
# stop the transmission process
killall transmission-daemon
# make a new configuration directory to hold the transmission configuration files
mkdir /opt/config
# move the freshly generated transmission configuration files off of the main flash drive and onto the spare flash drive
mv /root/.config/transmission-daemon /opt/config/
# move into the transmission configuration directory
cd /opt/config/transmission-daemon/
# backup the generated configuration file
cp settings.json settings.json.backup

3. CONFIGURING THE BITTORENT CLIENT
At this point, the Transmission BitTorrent client is installed on your Pogoplug, congratulations! Now we need to decide on a location for torrents to be downloaded to. To do this, perform the following (in a terminal session):

# Display disk usage
df -h

and observe the output. This command lists hard drives connected to the Pogoplug, as well as any mounted internal flash drives. You can choose any drive to download to, but I would advise a connected USB hard drive to prevent unnecessary reading of the flash drive, and also help prevent filling up the internal flash drives (which can lead to boot problems).
Anyway, you should see something similar to this:

-bash-3.2# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mtdblock2           32.0M     14.4M     17.6M  45% /
none                    125.0M      3.2M    121.8M   3% /tmp
/tmp/.cemnt/sda1        916.9G    435.1G    472.5G  48% /tmp/.cemnt/mnt_sda1
/dev/mtdblock3           91.0M     14.7M     76.3M  16% /opt

The USB drives connected to your pogo plug will be mounted under "/tmp/.cemnt/". In my case, I chose the following destination folder (which already existed on my Pogoplug):


/tmp/.cemnt/mnt_sda1/My Documents/Downloads/

Now we will update the Transmission configuration file to use our selected directory. To edit the file, enter the following:

# Enter a text editor to edit Transmissions settings.
vi /opt/config/transmission-daemon/settings.json

You will need to update the following keys with your selected download directory: "download-dir", "incomplete-dir".


4. RUNNING THE BITTORENT CLIENT

To start the BitTorrent client, run the following:

# Start the Transmission client, pointing the application to the custom configuration directory
/opt/bin/transmission-daemon --config-dir /opt/config/transmission-daemon/

You should now be able to access the web interface for the BitTorrent client by entering the following into a browser on a device in the same local network as your Pogoplug:


http://pogoplug:9091/transmission/web/


Replacing "pogoplug" with the IP address/domain name of your Pogoplug device.
Your Pogoplug is now running a BitTorrent client :)


UPDATE: See my new post on how to allow for adding new torrent files from the my.pogoplug.com website :)