Updated on September 9, 2020 at 12:23 am
I have had folks ask me about my torrent setup for pulling various Linux distros and such so I thought I would go ahead and share that setup.
I’ve been using this current setup for quite a while and there are two primary drivers for this setup; 1) I don’t want and actually block torrent traffic on my network 2) I believe in privacy as much as possible when it comes to my interactions on the interwebs.
Additional specifics on my wiki site:
Torrent with Privacy
I use an encrypted Linux virtual machine (VM) because I wanted to separate this environment from my daily desktop and I also wanted to have the VPN active in this VM 24×7.
First you want to purchase a torrent service (seedbox) and VPN service using Bitcoin. If you haven’t used bitcoin, read up on it and it can be made fairly simple by using a service such as Coinbase, Circle, etc.
Once you purchase those two services, you will ONLY access your torrent service and the control panel while connected to the VPN or if you really want to get froggy, use TAILS (look it up).
Most services give you the ability to download your files once the torrent is complete via http or ftp. Again this is all performed while connected to the VPN.
Depending on the torrent service you use, downloading the completed file via the browser while connected to the VPN may be fast, however sometimes it is not. In this case you can use a command line tool called Axel to perform fast multi-threaded downloads via a http or https URL.
Again, a VM isn’t required, but if you are going to do this using your daily desktop, remember to use the VPN for privacy.
Check out the wiki page mentioned earlier and remember this setup does not guarantee complete privacy, especially if you have someone determined to identify you.