The new ReadyNAS firmware (4.01c1-p1 as of this writing) comes with an OK Bittorrent downloader. It has a slick AJAX web interface that shows the status of torrents and allows adding torrents via an HTTP upload or a URL.
It is OK for the regular user who doesn’t want to muck around in the command line. Fortunately we’re not regular users and we want to squeeze as much performance out of the ReadyNAS as possible. :) One of the biggest drawbacks with the included client is a 50 peer limit for all torrents. Good speeds come with more peers and 50 is not nearly enough.
So rTorrent to the rescue. rTorrent is a command line based bittorrent client that is powerful, very lightweight and is not affected by the 50 peer limit. The biggest disadvantage is that it is a real pain to use. Just check out this screenshot of the main page. It takes a little getting used to.
In order to get rTorrent running you need to follow two sets of instructions. All these instructions assumes you already have SSH access to your ReadyNAS. The first thing you need to do is install the tools for compiling software from source. On my ReadyNAS running 4.01c1-p1, apt-get installed all of these without any problems.
The next step is to install rTorrent from source and configuring it to run how you want it. You will be compiling two packages, libTorrent and rTorrent. libTorrent is just the torrent library and takes about a half our to install. rTorrent is the actual command like interface and that takes about an hour to install. After the compile is done, run rTorrent in screen and away you go.
