Using one Raspberry Pi for absolutely everything

Following the guide in the Notes section I added VPNed torrent capability to the Pi3 that already does the SSH forwarding and speedtests. The speeds through the VPN were good and the guide configures it to have minimal chance of IP leaks. However, there still needs to be a way to get the files off the RPi once downloaded.

While this solution may result in painful speeds, the easiest way to get the downloaded files is to set up a SAMBA share.

If I want the files to be accessible from the internet in the future I will need something more secure (perhaps an owncloud setup pointed at the folder). The Transmission webpage would also potentially need to be accesibble from the internet.

Samba setup

I pointed the SAMBA share at the /home/vpn/Download folder used to store the torrent downloads. I set up the SAMBA share as public and guest accessible since only local network connections are able to get to the Pi on anything but port 22 (which is forwarded through two routers).

Trying to get samba running with systemctl resulted in various errors about missing runlevels or masks. sudo systemctl enable smbd.service nmbd.service seems to have worked as the share is accessible, and the smbd process is running.

After getting this all setup I changed the samba and transmission config files to point at a portable hard drive instead of a location on the very small SD card.

The transfer speeds were not bad for samba on a wired raspberry pi to a wifi-connected device (4 MB/s).

Fighting with automount

The major changes I had to make in /etc/usbmount/usbmount.conf were:

• FILESYSTEMS="vfat ntfs fuseblk ext2 ext3 ext4 hfsplus"
• FS_MOUNTOPTIONS="-fstype=vfat,uid=1001,gid=46,dmask=0002,fmask=0002, -fstype=ntfs-3g,uid=1001,gid=46,dmask=0002,fmask=0002, -fstype=fuseblk,uid=1001,dmask=0002,fmask=0002"
• Note the commas after the last options entry for each fstype in FS_MOUNTOPTIONS. usbmount will silently fail to mount the disks (all of them) without this format being followed. The vfat disks mounted as 1001:46 but the NTFS disk mounted as 0:0 (root). Despite this, I was able to go in as a normal user and create/delete/change files.
• Strangely, when the disks didn’t mount usbmount made a symlink in /var/run/usbmount out of the disk labels. When they did mount usbmount did not make these symlinks.

100% CPU/IO usage on NTFS mount with Transmission

• As described here
• It seems a bunch of factors (Linux NTFS drivers, the way Transmission works, the relative low power of the RPi) mean that using an NTFS hard drive will have huge CPU usage due to many small writes being done
• A good solution can be to enable the incomplete-dir feature of Transmission in which it will store unfinished torrents in a different directory than finished ones. The external hard drive could have a 30-50GB ext4 partition created.

No or little seeding when behind VPN

• This is (apparently a port issue)[https://forum.transmissionbt.com/viewtopic.php?t=18039]
• Luckily htpcguides has a good guide on how to do this for PIA
• /etc/openvpn/portforward.sh is configured with the PIA credentials and the Transmission web GUI login credentials

Aside

The issues I was having with Transmission’s website not showing up for LAN-connected computers seems to have resolved itself by redoing everything from scratch on a RPi3 except install MoinMoin. My best guess is that nginx was assuming every incoming connection was for it but then discarding them when it didn’t find a website bound to that port.

Notes

This guide on VPN split tunneling was easy to follow and worked very well. It even has specific directions for whether you’re using Ubuntu, Debian, or Raspbian. (Part 2)[https://www.htpcguides.com/configure-transmission-for-vpn-split-tunneling-ubuntu-16-04-debian-8/] sets up the reverse proxy so that Transmission’s web interface can be accesed even while all Transmission traffic is going through the VPN.

A really old school guide to BitTorrent

SAMBA guide from magpi

Making usbmount play nicely