I discovered p2p protocols, namely bitorrent, quite young.

I proceeded to download everything I thought I needed, mainly music and videos games at that time, on our shitty residential ADSL (it was really shitty, around 50-150kbps if I remember correctly)

Then came Hadopi.

It sucked. And suddenly it was in my name I was getting the feared letters

Recently, i’ve read that Swiss was a wonderful country for p2p

I already liked their chocolate…

The VPN

I use Mullvad.

I won’t start shilling here, choose your provider based on your criterion.

I use their generated openvpn files for this, for it’s simple deployement and how it handle having multiple servers.

I made a config with every Swiss server they have

I then use the tunnel as the default gateway

The client

I use transmission, because it has a headless server.

Using the Qt desktop client, I can connect to the remote headless daemon and use it seamlessly when opening magnet links or torrent files on the computer I use.

It has a WebUI, that can come in handy sometimes (hello, potato couch me !).

The server setup

Nothing special here, just a small VM on my lan.

I configured transmission server, and mounted a NFS share for the download directory.

# cat /etc/fstab
[...]
128.66.0.1:/Downloads	/var/lib/transmission/nfs    nfs         defaults,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,retrans=5,_netdev,noauto,soft,user	0 0

Everything that I download goes directly to my NAS Downloads directory, no need to fetch the files.

I can keep avoid storing anything on the VM also.

I added an override to the default transmission service file, just to make sure I won’t glow if the tunnel goes down, or start too slowly

# cat /etc/systemd/system/transmission.service.d/override.conf
[Unit]
Description=Transmission BitTorrent Daemon
After=network.target
After=openvpn-client@mullvad_ch.service
BindTo=openvpn-client@mullvad_ch.service

[Service]
User=USER

Afterword

It turns out HADOPI didn’t exist anymore at the time of either writing this article or even configuring the seedbox.

Nonetheless, I’m quite satisfied; this setup is cool.

Also, I don’t believe they will stop trying to regulate downloads on the internet (even if p2p isn’t the most popular way to exchange file today).