Transmission bittorrent client on OpenWRT

Well, I’ve just recieved my brand new 1TB external harddrive, which is a Western Digital Desktop Elements. I’m also the owner of a ASUS wl500gp router running OpenWRT, and I figured, why not combine these two things, and run a bittorrent client on the router.

Preparing the harddrive

The harddrive I recieved was preformatted with the FAT32 filesystem, so I quickly changed that: sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdd1

Preparing the router

Alright, first of, I needed to install some kernel modules and of course transmission:

opkg install kmod-usb2 kmod-usb-storage kmod-fs-ext3 transmission

Now, I used the webinterface provided by OpenWRT to setup the mountpoint for my harddrive. The partition I wanted to mount was located at /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 and I wanted to mount it at /media.

Now all I needed to do was to make transmission work. I wanted to use the webbased version, since this it’s convinient. Unfortunately for me, the webpages is not included in the transmission package for openWRT, so I had to get it from the transmission website. I then extracted the tarball and copied the web directory to the root of the external harddrive.

Now I connected the harddrive to the ASUS router, and ran this command:
mount /media ; mkdir -p .local/share/transmission ; ln -s /media/web/ .local/share/transmission/web; mkdir /media/torrent/

Now, I was ready to try and run the transmission client like this:

transmission-daemon -f -b -t -u test -v test -w /media/torrent

It just works.

Related posts:

• Startup script for transmission on OpenWrt.
• Building an OpenWrt twitter client
• OpenWrt USB automount on boot
• Controlling transmission using json-rpc in perl
• OpenWRT and sshfs

Tags: bittorrent, howto, OpenWrt, transmission