Full disclosure: I've been pretty lazy when it comes to setting up an efficient, anonymous, and performant torrent system. I played with a raspberry pi seedbox a few months ago, but didn't find much use for it, so I've been doing the lazy thing and going to TPB directly.<p>Now that it's down, I'd like to switch horses and put more effort into a system that accomplishes those three goals.<p>So pirates of the HN seas, I ask you: how do you download torrents? What programs/sites/VPNs/etc. do you use and why?
In my experience, the best thing you can do to keep yourself safe is use private trackers. With these you're extremely unlikely to get a DMCA request/ISP notice. You also get higher quality torrents that are uploaded in a more timely manner and seeded better. One downside is that you have to seed, but I have seeded constantly for years from multiple ISPs and have had no issues ever.<p>I'm gradually transitioning away from a desktop based setup to a raspi based one. I'm planning on using deluge/transmission, as many others in this thread have mentioned. I'm going to setup a webUI so that adding torrents is stupidly easy. The raspi will also function as a network share, so anyone on my network can stream/drop content. I was also considering writing a command line tool to grab torrents from private trackers and add them to the seedbox, so that I could share my account on those trackers with the people I live with. This is technically against the rules of private trackers, but I don't think there would be any way to tell that I was using this for multiple users.<p>With this setup, I might end up running all of my traffic through a VPN, as my current ISP shapes torrent traffic, so I could probably get better seeds setting up a VPN on Digital Ocean or some other cloud/VPN provider.
I rent a dedicated server from Kimsufi. 16 GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage. I think it costs me $25-$30 USD a month.<p>I threw Ubuntu on it and then setup rtorrent, rutorrent, and Apache HTTP Server.<p>I only use private trackers like what.cd.<p>I'm still trying to determine the best way to transfer the data from the server to my media box. At this point I use lftp with sftp which is working out well, but I want to set up an automated system.
I'm using a Raspberry PI with transmission to handle my torrents.<p>I can go to the web page and just paste the magnet URL and it just downloads it for me.<p>I also have flexget running from time to time which checks if there are any new episodes of TV Shows I'm following and automatically downloads that for me and places them in the correct folders after downloading.<p>I was mostly inspired by this tutorial (<a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=47084" rel="nofollow">http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=47084</a>) but I've made some changes along the way.<p>I can publish my flexget config if you want to take a look, I believe I had to make some changes in it after an update.
I'm also not using the Trakt.tv functionality. I find it easier to just edit the config file than to sign up for a website and create a bunch of lists and whatnot.
I've heard good things about what.cd from people who actually pirate material. (I, myself, only used Torrents when I couldn't get material I purchased legally to play/stream on my Linux laptop.)
I pay $6 a month for a seedbox from seed.st. That way no torrent traffic goes through my pipes. Any files I download can be transferred to my machine from the seedbox using secure ftp.