creating a torrent (running on DNS-323 NAS)

[shredhead1080]

This may be covered elsewhere and I did search but did not quite find what I was looking for..

I run Transmission on my D-Link DNS-323 NAS box. I just installed it today and the process was pretty smooth. It appears that it will be an excellent way for me to download things without having to leave the PC running.

My question is, can I CREATE a torrent file and then seed that content for others?

I have a pretty good size file I would like to share with co-workers. What I did just now, successfully I think, is I used uTorrent from my PC to make the torrent file and then I uploaded it via the web interface. Since the file is on the NAS, it is now "verifying local data" and then I am assuming it would begin seeding. But if I could create the torrent file from Transmission, right on my NAS, I believe it would save me some time during that creation process. It tied up the PC for well over an hour.

[rb07]

My question is, can I CREATE a torrent file and then seed that content for others?

Yes.

With Transmission on your NAS you only have the option of CLI (command line interface) tools, which are only available in released versions since 2.10 (current is 2.11). The tool you are looking for is called transmission-create.

You can also run one of Transmission GUI applications to create torrents. Depending on the OS you're using, Windows or Linux: Transmission-GTK or Transmission-Qt; Mac OSX: Transmission.app .

The procedure you used is fine, as long as your paths and file names are the ones on the NAS (i.e. no differences on locale, meaning no foreign language names if the NAS can't handle them).

But something looks wrong when you say it took "well over an hour"... creating the .torrent file takes seconds, perhaps you meant adding all the files to an archive (rar, or zip, or tar.bz2, etc.), that is not part of "creating a torrent". Computing the hashes does take time proportional to the total size, so if it was a big file perhaps that's what took so much time, but hours? it has to be really big (or your anti-virus made you "drive with the hand-brake on").

[shredhead1080]

Zipping everything up took around 2 hours and the file size is about 25GB.

Copying it to the NAS over FTP took at least 2 hours. (I have gigabit but the transfer rate was ~4MB/sec. and that was connected to the same switch. Hopefully I can fix that with DLink's help or folks on their forums.)

Making the torrent took about an hour. I bet if I make the torrent before transferring the zip file to the NAS it will go faster next time.

Anyhow, thanks, I will look to use transmission-create. I don't mind doing it CLI style.