A server is tremendously useful for file sharing for instance, but a torrent server could be used as a centralized download (or upload) machine. Applied to a home or small office, it will accelerate software distribution. Keep to find out how to download torrents with macOS Server 2011.
This series of posts are related on transforming this old Mac Mini from 2011 into a ‘new' and useful macOS Server 2011. If you are new to this topic, check out the first post. For more posts about this topic, please follow this link.
Table of Contents
Why the macOS Server to download Torrents
There are a couple reasons to do that:
- Servers work 24/7.
- Servers don't have battery difficulties.
- Servers have a faster and more reliable Ethernet connection.
- This feature can be used by more people in your home or small office.
If you need to download a file with a torrent client, such as µTorrent, it will be certainly much more convenient to use the server instead of you laptop. Plus, you can set a speed limit during laboring hours.
Make it automatic to download Torrents
Press Cmd + ‘,' to open the preferences. Make sure that the following options are checked.
- Start downloads automatically.
- Start µTorrent when Mac starts up.
- Prevent sleep when transfers are active.
Setup a speed Schedule
You should set the torrent client to use to whole bandwidth of your internet only in hours where nobody uses the internet (not even you!). Limit the download and upload speed of the torrent server the rest of the time. My suggestion would be to use just 10% of the bandwidth from 07h00 to 22h00, for instance.
Go to the preferences on the torrent client and then click on “Scheduler” (or the equivalent in yours). Check on the “Enable Scheduler” and click on the hours of the day and week that you would like to assign a “Full Speed” or “Limit” profile.
Automatically load the Torrents
On your server, open your torrent client. Open the preferences (CMD + ‘,' if you are on macOS) and go to the ‘directories'.
Click on the check “automatically load .torrents from” and select the folder that you would like. I suggest the default Downloads folder because of the convenience.
Set the Permissions to download Torrents to access the Folder from a remote Computer
This will enable to drop the files from you laptop into your server, for example. You could do it by any of this two methods. For this example, I will use the finder since the server is a Mac.
File Explorer App from your OS.
Make a secondary click (or option + click) on the ‘Downloads' folder and click on “Get Info”. At the bottom, you will “Share and permissions”. Make sure to unlock by clicking on the lock and providing the administrator credentials.
Select which users from the computer should have permission to drop files to the folder (write) as well as retrieve the files once downloaded (read).
Share Preferences
Click on the Apple icon, then System Preferences, then Share.
Check on File Sharing on the left menu and then clic on the plus icon on the bottom. A window will pop-up requesting you to select the folder that you want to share but I recommend you to choose the Downloads folder. After that on the right click on the plus (+) / minus (-) to add or remove users, respectively.
Test for Download Torrents
Let's see it in action.
Recently, I bought in the Humble Bundle store a bundle of “Python programming” ebooks during a limited time offer. I could download the files directly, but instead I will use the more efficient option: P2P torrent client. I clicked on ‘Bittorrent' and “Massive Download”, once for the PDF format and then again for EPUB.
Now I will connect remotely from my current computer to the folder on the torrent server. On Finder, I pressed Cmd + K to open the “Connect to server” window. I selected the IP of the macOS server and then I connected to the ‘Downloads' folder.
Finally, I dropped the torrent files from the ‘Downloads' folder from my computer to the ‘Downloads' folder from the macOS server. The torrent client accepted inmediatly the files and started downloading. It is that easy.
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- The outstanding Internet Protocol Layers and its hidden way
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