Filed under: Features, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, P2P, Lists
Four ways to start torrent downloads remotely
by Lee Mathews Apr 20th 2009 at 9:00AM
There's more than one way to skin a cat. Today's cat: starting torrent downloads on your computer from a remote location!
The first two options require 1) your home machine's address and 2) a forwarded port on your router. If you're on a dynamic IP connection like me, a DDNS updating service like Dyndns.org makes finding your machine much easier - it gives you an easy-to-remember, permanent address likemycomputerathome.dyndns.org. Not too sure how to set up port forwarding on your router? Check out PortForward.com for help with just about any brand or model.
If you'd rather not mess around with port forwarding and dynamic dns, you might want to try setting up Hamachi or Comodo Easy VPN on your machines. Either one will provide you LAN-like access to your main computer with minimal fuss (apart from installing and configuring a new program).
Or you could skip the zero-config VPN software and check out the last two options after the break - neither of which require you to know your home system's address or change any router settings.
Now let's get started!
Using Your Client's WebUI (pictured above)
uTorrent, Transmission, and Deluge all offer a web-based control panel for their clients. Getting remote access is as simple as opening the appropriate port on your router and then opening the right address in your web browser.
For uTorrent, you may need to download the webui.zip from their forums and save it to your %appdata%\utorrent folder.
With P2P Transfer Client/Server (Windows)
If your preferred client doesn't have a web interface option, P2P transfer provides a simple workaround. Install the server component on your download machine and the client on any machine from which you want to remotely initiate downloads. There's even a Windows Mobile client so you can start transfers from your smartphone.
The client passes your torrents' hashes back to the server which tells your system to fire up the default torrent client and begin downloading. Just make sure you set your torrent app to begin transfers automatically, or you'll come home to a screen full of dialog boxes.
As with a web interface, you'll need your home machine's address and a forwarded port for this to work.
Via RSS with FeedMyTorrents, PirateBay's Personal RSS, or Mininova Bookmarks
Most decent torrent clients support subscribing to an RSS feed - the trick is finding the right place to create the feed. A number of sites allow you to subscribe to RSS, but try it with "Windows 7," for example, and see what happens. You'll probably end up with duplicate downloads and other unwanted files.
The pesonalized feeds on Mininova and PirateBay allow you to add only what you want, though you're limited to torrent that can be found on their searches. FeedMyTorrents requires one more step - you've got to find the torrent elsewhere then add it to your feed on FMT - but it will work with any torrent link you can copy, regardless of where you find it.
To create your own feed on any of the sites you'll need to register and log in, of course.
With a remote sync service and your client's watch folder
uTorrent, Vuze and Transmission have a handy feature that can automatically add torrents when they appear in a watched folder. Turning this into a way to initiate transfers remotely is fairly simple - set it to watch your local Box.Net orDropBox folder, for example, and you're good to go. If you're using Windows, sync.live.com is another good option.
When you save a torrent into the folder on your remote machine, it'll sync onto your download PC and the client will kick in and start the transfer.
Got another method you prefer? Share it in the comments!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
PT said 10:01AM on 4-20-2009
I've used uTorrent's WebUI for about 1 year now and it work's great :)
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TheLinx said 10:24AM on 4-20-2009
uTorrent has the load-torrents-from-folder-as-they-are-added feature too.
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BigBossSNK said 10:46AM on 4-20-2009
Dyndns.org requires registration. If you don't want that, you can use a free Windows utility called DynamicIP.
It checks the system's IP address for changes, and sends an update to dyndns.org AND/ OR your email AND/ OR an FTP site of your choosing.
I chose to get email notifications, set up the whole thing in 5 mins and have been using the whole thing without a problem for the last 10 months.
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Joe said 11:07AM on 4-20-2009
Oh I miss the days of audiogalaxy. Hear a song you like? log into their website, select a file. By the time you got home it was on like popcorn.
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rcarm said 11:14AM on 4-20-2009
I use torrentflux because it's based on PHP so all I have to do is go to my website and log in.
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gvpadilha said 11:25AM on 4-20-2009
At home, I have setup my client (Torrent on Ubuntu) to monitor a folder inside my main Dropbox folder. When I'm at office (net access via MS ISA Server, so I have only http and https) and find a torrent, I put it on my local torrent (office's machine) folder which is then synced via Dropbox to my Ubuntu machine, and voilà! No open ports on my router :-)
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mewithafez said 12:59PM on 4-20-2009
also, you could just remote into it. using vnc, windows remote desktop, leopard's version of it, etc... though i do love the dropbox idea!
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Ahmad said 1:27PM on 4-20-2009
At my office, almost anything related to social networking, P2P, or filesharing is blocked so I had to find a solution that uses only e-mail.
I remembered that in the olden days when I used to use Eudora as a mail client it used to drop all of its attachments into a single folder whenever you opened an e-mail. So I downloaded Eudora 6.2 which is still available from their website, setup a gmail address, and configured Eudora to fetch any e-mail that comes to the torrent e-mail and then open it which drops the attachment (in this case the torrent file) into the attachment dir.
Now the trick is to configure your bittorrent client (in my case Azureus) to download any torrent file that's dropped into a certain dir and then configure Eudora to use that dir as its attachment dir.
So to download a torrent, all I have to do is send an e-mail to that gmail address with as many torrent files as I want to download and Azureus will download them on my home machine.
It's really much simpler than it seems!
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Dagur said 1:46PM on 4-20-2009
ssh + rtorrent here
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supernova_hq said 5:51AM on 4-21-2009
Another vote for ssh + rtorrent.
I just set up a "watch" folder, then scp the .torrent file in there and it automatically starts torrenting.
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gylu said 7:57PM on 4-22-2009
I have been away from home before and felt the need to download a torrent so I SSHed into my Linux box and used Transmission-cli to start them remotely. Not the easiest way to start them with Transmission but when you don't have your web interface turned on it gets the job done.
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