Good BitTorrent client that can run as daemon?

Message

Jiokah · Post by **Jiokah** » Thu Dec 25, 2008 6:29 am

Heya,

I was hoping to transfer all bittorrent jobs to my server but I can't seem to find a good client. Most of them need a GUI of some kind, or will not run as a daemon in the background. I need this as my server doesn't even have a video card in it, I'd need to access it through SSH or HTTP.

Any good suggestions? Thanks!

-Matthew

massimo · Post by **massimo** » Thu Dec 25, 2008 8:39 am

screen+rtorrent is what I use - you can use wtorrent as a web frontend for rtorrent if you like.

codergeek42 · Post by **codergeek42** » Thu Dec 25, 2008 9:02 am

I highly recommend Deluge. In its current incarnation, it can run as a stand-alone daemon with any of GTK+, CLI, or web-based ("WebUI") frontends.

Edit: According to gentoo-portage.com, it is in Portage as net-p2p/deluge.

Jiokah · Post by **Jiokah** » Thu Dec 25, 2008 7:06 pm

I was actually thinking of Deluge, but portage wants me to install 63 packages along with it! Mostly x11 stuff. The only USE flag I see for Deluge is libnotify which is disabled. How do I get around installing everything?

Simba7 · Post by **Simba7** » Thu Dec 25, 2008 7:10 pm

Jiokah wrote:I was actually thinking of Deluge, but portage wants me to install 63 packages along with it! Mostly x11 stuff.

Ouch. Why 63 packages? I'll just stick with screen+rtorrent.

codergeek42 · Post by **codergeek42** » Thu Dec 25, 2008 8:41 pm

Jiokah wrote:I was actually thinking of Deluge, but portage wants me to install 63 packages along with it! Mostly x11 stuff. The only USE flag I see for Deluge is libnotify which is disabled. How do I get around installing everything?

Not sure, actually. The CLI and WebUI frontends would probably work just fine if you installed it manually (e.g., from the tarball instead of Portage); but you'd still need the non-GTK/X11 dependencies installed (such as Boost and OpenSSL).

Jiokah · Post by **Jiokah** » Thu Dec 25, 2008 8:53 pm

Hmm, I don't like the idea of broken dependancies on my system, even if it'll work. One day when updating I'm going to miss something and all those x11 packages will find their way into my system! And trust me, I WILL miss something, it's in my nature

Anyone else know of a bittorrent client that will run as a daemon without installing hordes of x11 packages? All of the ones I've tried seem to want to do that. Screen+rtorrent seems like the best alternative if I can't find a daemon client, but I'd still prefer the daemon.

baeksu · Post by **baeksu** » Fri Dec 26, 2008 4:30 am

There's always btg, which does require boost for building. It comes with a daemon, and optional cli, ncurses, gtk, and php local/remote clients.

Setting it up is a little funky, but I've been happily running it for several months now.

Jiokah · Post by **Jiokah** » Fri Dec 26, 2008 4:51 am

Hey, BTG sounds good, but it's masked on portage, keyword ~x86....What does that mean?

Raniz · Post by **Raniz** » Fri Dec 26, 2008 6:24 am

Jiokah wrote:Hey, BTG sounds good, but it's masked on portage, keyword ~x86....What does that mean?

~ in front of your arch means that it's not yet deemed stable on your architecture. You can safely ignore this and to emerge it you add:

Code: Select all

net-p2p/btg ~x86

to your /etc/portage/package.keywords

amdg · Post by **amdg** » Fri Dec 26, 2008 7:16 am

Just want to mention that rtorrent can be configured to watch a given directory, which makes it start/stop downloading whatever .torrent files you add/remove from there. I don't know if you need more from a daemon, but this setup works very well for me.

Jiokah · Post by **Jiokah** » Fri Dec 26, 2008 7:32 am

That sounds neat about rtorrent. I have an ignorant question though, I have only SSH access to my server, nothing else (it doesn't even have a video card). Once I started rtorrent and logged out, how would I get back into it? Can I just control it from a CLI?

I think I'm going to try BTG first though, thank Raniz for your post, imma unmask it and see how she runs.

Gusar · Post by **Gusar** » Fri Dec 26, 2008 10:49 am

Jiokah wrote:Once I started rtorrent and logged out, how would I get back into it?

You log back in and resume the screen session where rtorrent is running. Or you also install one of the many web frontends for it, and control it remotely through that.

Dr.Willy · Post by **Dr.Willy** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 2:03 pm

net-p2p/mldonkey

szczerb · Post by **szczerb** » Sat Dec 27, 2008 11:00 pm

Will any of those clients come with a service script in /etc/init.d ?

I'd really like to have a torrent client working as a service so that I don't have to worry about it in case of a reboot, power spike etc.

niick · Post by **niick** » Sun Dec 28, 2008 12:25 am

An init script for rtorrent is available in these forums. Btw rtorrent is very good.

Edit: I went and found it.

Jiokah · Post by **Jiokah** » Sun Dec 28, 2008 4:59 am

Ok yeah I think I'm sold on rtorrent, will try it out!!

outermeasure · Post by **outermeasure** » Sun Dec 28, 2008 5:39 am

Jiokah wrote:Ok yeah I think I'm sold on rtorrent, will try it out!!

The only problem is that rtorrent doesn't come with any ip-filtering, so you will have to either add 10k+ lines in your firewall rules, or be willing to be spied on.

Devcon · Post by **Devcon** » Sun Dec 28, 2008 9:34 am

I think it is in the unstable branch, but I use aria2. I like it as it allows me to download all my files, http, ftp, bittorent as a daemon.

http://aria2.sourceforge.net/

Simba7 · Post by **Simba7** » Sun Dec 28, 2008 6:24 pm

outermeasure wrote:
Jiokah wrote:Ok yeah I think I'm sold on rtorrent, will try it out!!
The only problem is that rtorrent doesn't come with any ip-filtering, so you will have to either add 10k+ lines in your firewall rules, or be willing to be spied on.

..can't you just run PeerGuardian?

Jiokah · Post by **Jiokah** » Sun Dec 28, 2008 7:49 pm

Simba7 wrote:The only problem is that rtorrent doesn't come with any ip-filtering, so you will have to either add 10k+ lines in your firewall rules, or be willing to be spied on.

..can't you just run PeerGuardian?[/quote]

No you can't use PeerGuardian, but it looks like MoBlock will do the trick just as good.

EDIT: Need to run an overlay to get the ebuild, try here.