Hi, my name is François Faubert.

It has been a while since my Linux home server has died from a hardware failure and so have my troubles in trying to set up a web based torrent manager on my home server.

Since it passed though, I have found a great and much cleaner solution and I thought I’d share all that I’ve tried with you guys.

TorrentFlux

In the begining, my personal file server was an Ubuntu box. As I had mentioned in an earlier post, I first tried using TorrentFlux to centralize my downloads at home.

Unlike most other manager, TorrentFlux is not an application with a web based counterpart; It’s truly running as a web app. This required a running webserver on the machine on which the app installed. I happened to do my personal web development on that box and already had MySQL and PHP installed and set up, but that might be one hell of an issue for someone who might not have the technical know how.

Because of all overlapping open source technologies related to this project, it had lots of potential but never really worked out for me. Also because of all the overlapping open source technologies, it seemed rather buggy at the time and lacked a couple of key configuration settings I was looking for.

Transmission

Then came Transmission. I had used the app on my MacBook for a while and was interested in trying their web UI to replace TorrentFlux. Somehow, I could not make it work over my LAN. It was likely a router problem, but I couldn’t get around it. Maybe the most current version of the software would worked fine now, but then I never figured it out.

The end of eras

Tired of always having technical issues with my Linux server in addition of the lingering hardware hiccups, I moved all my fileshare over on a Windows 7 box that also acted as my Home Theater PC.

uTorrent or the ‘it was right there all along app’

Almost everyone I know uses uTorrent by now. It’s a truely lightweight and elegant solution for maintaining your torrent downloads. Packaged with the software is a simple web based solution that bridges the uTorrent file process on the central computer with web clients. Basically, you add a file from the browser on your laptop and it downloads on the central file share automagically.

Once WebUi has been turned on from uTorrent’s preferences, you can reach it from everywhere on the network at a URL that could look something like this:
http:// [IP of the machine with uTorrent] : [uTorrent port] /gui/

You can additionally set up login authentication if you need some level of security around the access to it.

I’ve been using this for the larger part of the last 2 years now and it has been working great. The only gripe I have against the WebUI is how visually different it looks from the uTorrent app itself. I mean it’s not even close: candy colored buttons, barbershop lines as backgrounds and somewhat clumsy dialogs layout (the upload dialog for instance).

Sure, it’s not a real problem. Still would have appreciated some level of polish on it anyway.

To your local LAN and beyond

With that running you can access your torrent transfers from any computer within your LAN using a web browser. The only constraints is to have that main computer always stay on and make sure uTorrent launches on startup. Then you’re all set.

If you want remote access to the UI, you could just set up simple port forwarding to have request point to the right IP and port on your local network. Be aware of the security issues this may bring though.