My son's college (understandably) has things pretty well locked down as far as torrents go. I am looking for a way to help him out. As a temporary measure I have set up a Linux box on a DSL connection so that he can run torrents using NX to log in and then sftp the files down to his system at school.

My question is this: Is it possible to set things up so that the Ktorrent client on my son's system tunnels to our system at home and then back out to the torrent peers from there? Just trying to eliminate having to keep a user session logged in to KDE all the time.

Alternatively, is it possible to get Ktorrent to run as an independent process without a user being logged in and running KDE?


Thanks.

We don't support socks proxies yet, but it should be added once the port to KDE 4 is finished. So at the moment, I don't think we have anything which can do this.

I'm glad to hear that this feature is coming. I suspect it will get a lot of use from technically savvy members of the frustrated college student crowd.javascript:emoticon(':lol:')

In the meantime, I am going to see if I can figure out how to get tsocks <http://sourceforge.net/projects/tsocks/> to work as a temporary solution.

Thanks for your help, and a nice piece of software.

A feature which we currently do have is encryption, have you tried that yet ? It is usually good enough to bypass ISP who are throttling their users. So it could work for your son.

Already tried it, no luck. Nothing like dorms full of students with lots of time and determination to make you improve your filtering.

I believe that there are ways to accomplish what I want - the problem is wading through the possibilities. Sometimes Linux offers too many solutions! Currently looking at stunnel/openssl, or perhaps even ssh, but I've got to find some time to sort through the details.

I appreciate the assistance, but I think I just need to make time to get my hands dirty and sort this out. When I do I'll post my solution in case someone else wants to do the same thing.

Best Regards.

I'm not sure if this will help, but here is my experience with running ktorrent remotely.

I have within my home network two computers. One is my normal desktop computer that is running Windows XP the other is my "server" computer which is running Slackware 11. The server computer runs services like SSH, SAMBA, Apache, and ktorrent. The server is setup so that it is headless, all that is connected to it is a power cord and a cat5 cable with the network card set to a static IP address.

I have ktorrent setup so that the webgui plugin is loaded and I use that to monitor torrent status from my desktop. To upload .torrents I have ktorrent setup to scan a certain folder and I just drag and drop torrents into it from my desktop through a SAMBA share. I do the same thing to get files off of it once it is done.

However when I am away from home and want to either start a torrent or check the status I log in through SSH. For simply checking the torrents through webgui I use "elinks" it is one of the few command line based browsers that supports PHP allowing me to view the webgui information. The only complaint about it I have is that you must put in the computers IP address and port instead of just typing localhost:8080.

When it comes time to actually transfer any data to or from the computer including but not limited to .torrent files. I use "SSH Secure Shell Client" (this program, I got my copy off of a school server a few years back so i dont know where to download a copy, sorry http://www.bris.ac.uk/is/learning/docum ... sh-i1.html ) The program allows for me to drag and drop the .torrent files or anything else with the interface.

Lastly changing anything that must be done from the GUI. I start up cygwin which runs a X11 server under Windows. I log in via SSH to my server using "ssh -X username@address" I have logged in both from the outside and inside my network with no problems. I shut down ktorrent that is running on the server then restart it in the remote login under cygwin and it pops up on my screen. I think the whole shutting it down and having to restart it has to do with it running under the same username as i login with. Anyway I change my settings and kill ktorrent then restart it with "ktorrent --display :0" and all seems well.

The only problem I have run into is that ktorrent seems to have somesort of problem whenever I reboot my XP computer. The webgui is unresponsive so I always have to kill ktorrent and restart it. My only guess is even though I am logged out of SSH some connection between the two is still being held. Oh well.

Sorry my thoughts were kind of random, if you have any questions or I missed something let me know.

Conrad

Thanks for your response. My goal, however, is to do something different from running KTorrent on the remote machine. We are already doing that using NoMachine (NX) and sftp (both of which use ssh). What I want to do is run the torrent client locally, and route the traffic through an encrypted tunnel in order to have the traffic exit to the outside world from the remote machine. That way it looks like ssh traffic to the local traffic shaping bandwidth filters, and runs at whatever the available speed may be. I am already certain that this is doable, but I've been busy with another project which has taken priority. Of course, the next (socksified) version of KTorrent will make this all a piece of cake, and at the rate I am going it may be out before I get time to set up my solution.

Regards.

SSH can act as a socks proxy :

ssh -D 10000 user@remote_host

Then you can use 127.0.0.1:10000 as a socks proxy, and this will route all the traffic over the SSH connection.