The first use I found for my ESXi server, I wanted a way to download and seed torrents without having to leave my laptop switched on all the time. However, I still wanted to check on the progress of torrents, control them from my laptop running OS X Lion and be able to reach the files.
The solution I created uses the following:
- Xubuntu 11.10 for the guest OS as I am familiar with Ubuntu but prefer lightweight
- Deluge 1.3.3 for the torrent software as it comes with the ability to run headless and have a web GUI
- Netatalk 2.2 (beta4-1) to allow AFP file transfer between the server and my OS X laptop
What follows is a quick overview of how I got it all working, I have to give thanks to this guide which I used a lot although it is slightly out of date now:
http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/
First I downloaded and installed Xubuntu in a virtual machine on my ESXi server and installed all available updates.
I then gave the machine a static IP as I would need to know the address it was using later:
sudo pico /etc/network/interfaces
And changed it to look something like this:
auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 192.168.1.100 netmask 255.255.255.0 network 192.168.1.0 broadcast 192.168.1.255 gateway 192.168.1.1
Where the ‘address’ line is the static IP I’m setting for this computer.
I then changed the hosts file to match this new IP address:
sudo pico /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost 192.168.1.100 ComputerName.local ComputerName
Next, I installed Netatalk:
sudo apt-get netatalk
Following parts 2 and 3 of this guide, I changed the Netatalk configuration files as needed and configured shared volumes.
When it came to editing the AppleVolumes.default file I had luck getting it to work with OS X Lion by using the DBD scheme:
/home/username/SharedFile SharedFile allow:username cnidscheme:dbd options:usedots,upriv
Continuing with the guide, I then installed and configured the Avahi daemon.
Once I had tested that I could successfully view the files on the server from my Mac, I went on to install Deluge
sudo apt-get install deluge
The easiest way to configure Deluge is to use the client GUI on the server and then connect using the web interface when you have finished.
The best information on running Deluge in this way can be found here:
http://dev.deluge-torrent.org/wiki/UserGuide/ThinClient