How-to: Installing Torrent-Flux

[kebes]

Hey Kebes. Great job and effort sticking with this thread. ... You've been at it for quite a while and must be the torrentflux guru by now.

Thanks! Yeah when I initially wrote this how-to, I never thought that I would end up being the "maintainer" for this topic... but it seems to be working out!

A question for all: Is there a way to pause and/or restart an upload/download with torrentflux?

Basically yes. When a torrent is running, you can click "stop torrent" (red downward-facing arrow). The torrent will then be marked as "incomplete" but none of the data-so-far is deleted. If you later click "run torrent" (green downward-facing arrow), it will verify existing data and continue building the file from where it left off. It will just take a few moments for it to re-connect to the peers.

(Of course, this is assuming that the torrent you were previously using has not died in the meantime...)

[Ian-on-the-Trent]

LOL...thanks for the super-quick response. You must live here.

[Ian-on-the-Trent]

And on another function . . . can you make the user directory private so no-one other than the user can see what's inside?

Yet another question: how hack-proof is torrentflux?

[kebes]

can you make the user directory private so no-one other than the user can see what's inside?

When you say "user directory" do you mean your user home folder (/home/user/ or whatever) or do you mean the contents of each torrentflux user?

Assuming you mean the torrentflux user folders, it's not easy to keep them hidden/private. If you have multiple users in torrentflux, they can all see what the others have downloaded.

It's possible to have two (or more) different installations of torrentflux on the same machine (just put them in different folders and create distinct databases for each). So you could have a public copy that most people use, and keep a separate copy running for private/sensitive things.

On the Linux side, the directory where the downloads get stored (/var/www/torrentflux/downloads/ or whatever) will typically be readable by everyone. However if you want to make it less visible, you can set it (and all sub-dirs) to be owned by "www-data" using the "chown" command (this is probably already the case), and then set the permissions to be restrictive as well using "chmod". Something like:

cd /var/www/torrentflux
sudo chown www-data:www-data downloads -R
sudo chmod 600 downloads -R
sudo chmod u+X downloads -R

Once this is done, only the user "www-data" (the webserver) will be able to read or write into that directory. So to check the contents or copy a file out, you will have to use admin power via "sudo" (obviously anyone with sudo-power will be able to find the files).

You'll also need to secure apache a bit to prevent someone from browsing those directories (since the apache webserver can browse them). There is a directive you can set in apache's config to suppress listing directory contents.

Yet another question: how hack-proof is torrentflux?

Interesting question. Torrentflux is a 'small-target' so it's unlikely many people are trying to hack it. I'm not aware of any major vulnerability in it, but it's entirely possible someone could exploit a flaw in it (true of all net-facing apps). Since torrentflux is run by the webserver, most hacks would be isolated to whatever directories the webserver can read/write.

So, I don't think it's a major worry, but you should in general not put important/sensitive files into directories that the webserver can read.

[Ian-on-the-Trent]

Thanks for all of your help Kebes. Cheers!

[cox377]

Hey All,

Been running a torrentflux box for about 9 months, however changed the password yesterday and somehow cannot remember it - this is the main password for geting into tflux

Does this relate anyway to the database password?

Basically, is there anyway of changing / resetting the password without having to reinstall the whole thing

Many Thanks

CoXen

[kebes]

is there anyway of changing / resetting the password without having to reinstall the whole thing

Yes, it can be done. Basically you just use the PHP function "md5" to create a hash of your new password, and manually copy this into the torrentflux MySQL database for that username.

For detailed instructions see this previous post:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...&postcount=125


If you have any questions about those steps, feel free to ask. Hope that works!

[cox377]

Yes, it can be done. Basically you just use the PHP function "md5" to create a hash of your new password, and manually copy this into the torrentflux MySQL database for that username.

For detailed instructions see this previous post:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...&postcount=125


If you have any questions about those steps, feel free to ask. Hope that works!

If you could provide step by step that would be greatly appreciative

[3ntity]

Hey,
I have torrentflux running on my server and was wondering whether there's any way of enabling downloading for a certain period of time, in my case from 2am-8am [due to stupid download limits imposed by ISP]. I was thinking of a cronjob or suchlike, but haven't found anything that does the job...

Thanks in advance,
3ntity

[cox377]

Many thanks for that, was at work originally thus the reason why I didn't read your msg properly with the link

Much appreciated

CoXen