AKA Making the Meebox 1,000,000 times more useful!
Someone asked me the other day how could one get a better BitTorrent client working on the meebox.. I started looking at creating a toolchain to do this, but quickly went to look at the optware set of packages..
What is Optware? Well basically it was originally developed for the Linksys NSLU2 NAS device but since been ported to many devices and YES it works with our looqs NAS device.. You simply need to know which version of optware you need..
Setup instructions
1. As optware installs all its packages in /opt you need to make sure its got enough disk space.. The Looqs / does not.. First step is to create a directory on your hard disk and link /opt to this
meebox> mkdir /mnt/ide3/opt
meebox> ln -s /mnt/ide3/opt /opt
2. After some digging around it turns out this device is a vt4 device so the following script installs and configures optware
meebox> feed=http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/vt4/cross/unstable
meebox> ipk_name=`wget -qO- $feed/Packages | awk '/^Filename: ipkg-opt/ {print $2}'`
meebox> wget $feed/$ipk_name
meebox> tar -xOvzf $ipk_name ./data.tar.gz | tar -C / -xzvf -
meebox> mkdir -p /opt/etc/ipkg
meebox> echo "src cross $feed" > /opt/etc/ipkg/feeds.conf
3. DONE!
Installing Transmission
This was my original objective, so here are the steps to install transmisison, a common/very good Bit Torrent client
1. Use optware to download the transmission software
meebox> export PATH=/opt/bin:$PATH
meebox> ipkg update
meebox> ipkg install transmission
2. One this is downloaded you will need to add your ip address to th whitelist list, or disable it completely. This is done by editing the “settings.json” file on the NAS
Look for the following line in the settings.json file and make sure its set to false
"rpc-whitelist-enabled": false,
3. Create a directory for your downloads
meebox> mkdir /mnt/ide3/transmissionDownloads
4. Transmission by default will store its config files in /.config, we dont want this on the Meebox as the root filesystem is wiped between boots.. I recommend creating a directory to store this and by setting the environment variable TRANSMISSION_HOME it will use that directory
meebox> mkdir /mnt/ide3/transmissionConfig
meebox> export TRANSMISSION_HOME=/mnt/ide3/transmissionConfig
5. When transmission is first started it will create a set of config files which we will need to edit. Now its time to start and stop the daemon
meebox> transmission-daemon -w /mnt/ide3/transmissionDownloads
meebox> killall transmission-daemon
6. By default Transmission uses whitelists to ensure only recognised clients can access the server. Providing the NAS is behind a firewall you can disable this. Edit the file settings.json using vi
meebox> vi /mnt/ide3/transmssionConfig/settings.json
and change this line in settings.json from
"rpc-whitelist-enabled": true,
to
"rpc-whitelist-enabled": false,
7. To ensure transmission is started on boot, see this
blog entry but ensure the environment variable TRANSMISSION_HOME is set!
8. We can start the transmission daemon, by runing
transmission-daemon -w /mnt/ide3/transmissionDownloads
9. Finally to access the UI use a webbrowser and go to
http://NAS_IP_adress:9091/transmission/web/Meanwhilst checkout these links
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Optware/Transmissionhttp://ubuntu-for-humans.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/how-to-install-torrent-client-on-ubuntu.htmlEnjoy
