Archive for the ‘linux-admin’ Category

How to install Transmission BitTorrent on a headless server in order to seed Spiritual Treasures – Final Edition

Monday, June 1st, 2015

The decision to install Transmission came after serious research and testing. This is also apply for the operating system choice – after testing Debian 6 and 7 on the server, and OpenSuse 13.2 on my local machine, I choose Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Here we go:

connect to your server via ssh

# ssh root@yourserverIP
enter password

first command to run is
# apt-get update
please, note that we do not use ‘sudo’ to run the commands, because you are the ‘root’ user
# apt-get install software-properties-common python-software-properties
this is needed to track your packages later
then we add the Transmission repository
# add-apt-repository ppa:transmissionbt/ppa
# apt-get update
# apt-get install transmission-cli transmission-common transmission-daemon
Now is the time to edit transmission-daemon configuration. Use editor of your choice – I use ‘nano‘. If it is not installed, install it with
# apt-get install nano
then edit configuration file with
# nano /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json
Some of the important changes to the default configuration you might want to do are:
“blocklist-enabled” (Ln 11) should be set to ‘true’ (this isn’t really required, but is highly recommended, as it ensures that no malicious peers try to connect to your server
“blocklist-url” (Ln 12) can be set to any blocklist you want, but one recommended is I-Blocklist. (http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_level1&fileformat=p2p&archiveformat=gz)
“rpc-authentication-required” (Ln 41) should be set to ‘true’ in order to protect login to the WebUI.
“rpc-enabled” (Ln 43) should be set to ‘true’
“rpc-password” (Ln 44) set password to access the WebUI
“rpc-username” (Ln 47) here comes your username to access the WebUI
“rpc-whitelist-enabled” (Ln 49) set it to ‘false’ to enable access to the WebUI from where ever you want.

# service transmission-daemon reload

That is it! No need to install additional scripts to run the service on server reboot, because transmission-daemon is already in the /etc/init.d directory and all works fine out of the box.

Now it is time to connect to WebUI. Start your web browser and point it to

http://yourserverIP:9091/transmission/web/

Enter your login details. From here you can add your desired torrents and also check/change the settings of your torrent client.

And since all this work I did with the main purpose to expand seeding of Spiritual Treasures – the world’s largest and most comprehensive compendium on God and Love – there was one very important point: to be able to manage its trackers after setting up the client and starting the torrents.
Transmission WebUI lacks this feature and I needed to find another way of doing it. And it is ‘Transmission Remote Gui’.
It should be installed on your local machine and it is available for my linux OS – OpenSuse, at
https://software.opensuse.org/package/transmission-remote-gui

If your linux distro does not provide this package, you can find the source code at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/transmisson-remote-gui.mirror/
And by the way, there is also application for Android on Google Play.

The Spiritual Treasures torrent file lost four of the five trackers it had at the time of its creation and it is extremely important to manually add some new ones, as mentioned on Spiritual Treasures – Kriya Yoga download page

And to find some new when use specialized torrent search engines by using the unique info hash: 8e0d636d4e7489ca55b5fd1ab044dc80ea2d15ba
One such major torrent search engine to show a large list of available original torrent sources and trackers currently is:
http://torrentz.eu/8e0d636d4e7489ca55b5fd1ab044dc80ea2d15ba

God bless

Upgrade to openSuSE 12.1 using zypper dup ended in emergency mode

Wednesday, June 20th, 2012

Recently I have upgraded openSuSE 11.3 on Acer Aspire One netbook to the latest version 12.1. Before that, I had already performed 3 times clean install on other laptops and every time the system worked perfectly out of the box.

This time I decided to do upgrade using “zypper dup” and followed all the suggestions to prepare the system for System Upgrade

To be safe I used the option –download “in-advance” in case something goes wrong and the upgrade is interrupted. And the whole command is:

# zypper dup –download “in-advance”

After all the packages were downloaded and installed , the system was restarted and it ended up in emergency mode.

Welcome to emergency mode. Use “systemctl default” or ^D to activate default mode.
Give root password for login:

There was another line on top of the screen

failed to execute: `/etc/sysconfig/network/scripts/ifup-sysctl` `/etc/sysconfig/network/scripts/ifup-sysctl lo -o hotplug`: No such file or directory

but I was sure that the problem is somewhere else, because it performed “fsck” on all partitions and maybe did not like something in /etc/fstab.

Anyway, I searched Google and found that system manager has been changed and now the system boots with systemd instead of previously used sysvinit.

So, I typed my root password and logged in the system and could even start KDE
with “startx”

Then I installed previous system manager package sysvinit-init and uninstalled systemd-sysvinit package

Rebooted and everything went fine.

There is another way to ignore systemd: at boot press F5 and choose system v from the drop-down menu.

But since systemd is going to be the default “init” in the future, it is better to read more about it at openSuSE-Systemd. I also did so and re-installed it again. The boot problem that I had was caused by my Windows partition, which I set to “noauto” ( this means the partition is not mounted during boot ) in /etc/fstab and the system boots normally now.

Enjoy one of the most powerful Linux distributions.