Installing Transmission through Entware - RMerl/asuswrt-merlin.ng GitHub Wiki

Introduction

Asus's DownloadMaster suffers from various issues: old versions of Transmission and OpenSSL, no way to disable aMule which will hog all your bandwidth, etc...

I recommend uninstalling Download Master, and manually setting up Transmission through Entware instead. This will bring various benefits:

Better performance overall
Magnet link support
Most people don't care about aMule or NZBGet - that will cut through the fat.

Initial configuration

For this I will assume your disk is mounted as /mnt/sda1/ (just adjust the paths as needed if yours is mounted as /mnt/sdb1 instead, for instance).

I will also assume that your disk is already formatted as either Ext2 or Ext3. If not, look on the web for information on how to reformat your disk.

Setup Entware and install the nano editor (unless you are already comfortable with the vi editor):

opkg install nano

Installation

We need to install Transmission:

opkg install transmission-web transmission-daemon
opkg install transmission-remote transmission-daemon

You may need to install certificate packages to connect to some https trackers:

opkg install ca-bundle ca-certificates

Create the data directories (adjust as desired):

mkdir /mnt/sda1/Torrent/
mkdir /mnt/sda1/Torrent/Incomplete
mkdir /mnt/sda1/Torrent/Watch
mkdir /mnt/sda1/Torrent/Completed

Make sure Transmission isn't already running, then edit its configuration:

/opt/etc/init.d/S88transmission stop
nano -w /opt/etc/transmission/settings.json

You will want to adjust the following paths:

"download-dir": "/mnt/sda1/Torrent/Completed",
"watch-dir": "/mnt/sda1/Torrent/Watch",
"incomplete-dir": "/mnt/sda1/Torrent/Incomplete",

It's also recommended to password-protect the webui. Set the following parameters:

"rpc-authentication-required": true,
"rpc-username": "admin",
"rpc-password": "yourpassword",

Your password will be hashed the first time Transmission runs, so it's safe to enter it as clear text there.

Firewall configuration

We need to create a user script that will open the required port in the firewall. If you changed this from the default value in settings.json then update this accordingly.

nano -w /jffs/scripts/firewall-start

Enter the following content (omit the first line if you already have an existing script)

#!/bin/sh
iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --destination-port 51413 -j ACCEPT
iptables -I INPUT -p udp --destination-port 51413 -j ACCEPT

Then make it executable:

chmod a+rx /jffs/scripts/firewall-start

Using it

Everything is now configured. You can manually start it immediately (it will automatically start at boot time):

/jffs/scripts/firewall-start
/opt/etc/init.d/S88transmission start

Access it through http://router.asus.com:9091/transmission

EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS

If you have a slow internet connection and you want to be notified when a torrent has finished downloading, place the following script which I called tmail.sh in /jffs/scripts but first don't forget to fill: SMTP, FROM, TO, USER and PASS with your credentials.

WARNING, may become annoying if you are downloading lots of torrents

#!/bin/sh

SMTP="your-smtp-server:587"
FROM="your-email-address"
TO="your-email-address"
USER="email-user-name"
PASS="email-password"
FROMNAME="Asus Router"
torrent_name="$TR_TORRENT_NAME"

echo "Subject: Download notification!" >/tmp/tmail.txt
echo "From: \\"$FROMNAME\\"<$FROM>" >>/tmp/tmail.txt
echo "Date: `date -R`" >>/tmp/tmail.txt
echo "" >>/tmp/tmail.txt
echo Transmissionbt has finished downloading "$TR_TORRENT_NAME" on `date +\%d/\%m/\%Y` at `date +\%T` >>/tmp/tmail.txt
echo "" >>/tmp/tmail.txt
echo "Your friendly router." >>/tmp/tmail.txt
echo "" >>/tmp/tmail.txt

cat /tmp/tmail.txt | /usr/sbin/sendmail -S"$SMTP" -f"$FROM" $TO -au"$USER" -ap"$PASS"

rm /tmp/tmail.txt

Stop transmission daemon, change this two lines in /opt/etc/transmission/settings.json and start transmission again

"script-torrent-done-enabled": true, 
"script-torrent-done-filename": "/jffs/scripts/tmail.sh",

EMAIL IN HTML FORMAT

#!/bin/sh

SMTP="your-smtp-server:587"
FROM="your-email-address"
TO="your-email-address"
USER="email-user-name"
PASS="email-password"
FROMNAME="Asus Router"
torrent_name="$TR_TORRENT_NAME"
torrent_version="$TR_APP_VERSION"

logger -t "$0" "Mail sent, about "$TR_TORRENT_NAME""

echo MIME-Version: 1.0 >/tmp/tmail.html
echo Content-Type: text/html >>/tmp/tmail.html
echo "Subject: Download notification" >>/tmp/tmail.html
echo "From: \\"$FROMNAME\\"<$FROM>" >>/tmp/tmail.html
echo "Date: `date -R`" >>/tmp/tmail.html
echo "" >>/tmp/tmail.html
echo "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">" >>/tmp/tmail.html
echo "<html>" >>/tmp/tmail.html
echo "<head><title></title>" >>/tmp/tmail.html
echo "</head>" >>/tmp/tmail.html

echo "<p>Transmissionbt v"$torrent_version" finished downloading:</p>" >>/tmp/tmail.html
echo "<p><b>"$TR_TORRENT_NAME"<b></p>" >>/tmp/tmail.html
echo "<p>on `date +\%d/\%m/\%Y` at `date +\%T`</p>" >>/tmp/tmail.html
echo "" >>/tmp/tmail.html
echo "<p>Your awesome router.</p>" >>/tmp/tmail.html
echo "<a href="http://tinypic.com?ref=2zod5ja" target="_blank"><img src="http://i40.tinypic.com/2zod5ja.png" border="0" alt="Image and video hosting by TinyPic"></a>" >>/tmp/tmail.html
echo "</body>" >>/tmp/tmail.html
echo "</html>" >>/tmp/tmail.html

cat /tmp/tmail.html | /usr/sbin/sendmail -S"$SMTP" -f"$FROM" $TO -au"$USER" -ap"$PASS"

rm /tmp/tmail.html

Example of received email: email Post issues here

Another guide here

Adding additional trackers to Transmission

This small script provided @ryzhovau updates current active torrents with additional trackers if the hash matches upon adding it in settings.json as

"script-torrent-added-filename": "/opt/bin/add_trackers.sh",

Install Transmission remote tool:

opkg install transmission-remote-openssl

#!/bin/sh

# Get transmission credentials
auth=                                            #(example: username:password)

add_trackers () {
    torrent_hash=$1
    base_url='https://torrentz2.eu'
    pattern='announcelist_[0-9]+'

    announce_list=`wget -qO - ${base_url}/${torrent_hash} | grep -Eo "${pattern}"`

    if [ -z "$announce_list" ] ; then
        echo 'No additional trackers found, sorry.'
        continue
    fi

    echo "adding trackers for $torrent_hash..."

    for tracker in $(wget -qO - ${base_url}/${announce_list}) ; do
        echo -n "* ${tracker}..."
        if [ -z "$(transmission-remote  --auth=$auth --torrent ${torrent_hash} -td ${tracker} | grep 'success')" ]; then
            echo ' failed.'
        else
            echo ' done.'
        fi
    done
}

# Get list of active torrents
ids="$(transmission-remote --auth=$auth --list | grep -vE 'Seeding|Stopped' | grep '^ ' | awk '{ print $1 }')"

for id in $ids ; do
    echo "Processing torrent #$id..."
    hash="$(transmission-remote --auth=$auth  --torrent $id --info | grep '^  Hash: ' | awk '{ print $2 }')"
    add_trackers $hash
done