I recently saw a write up on Digg about how to make a dedicated machine do nothing but download .torrent files.  That seems pretty stupid to me until I really thought about it.  With this setup I can have the torrent box use a different internet connection, but still keep it on my network.  I can crank the share speeds up and not affect VPN, VNC or other things I use.

Now I have one in my server rack and I love it.  This was the first build of this server.  After using it I decided I needed a bit more features and rebuilt it in a different way.  So, this article is for the "simple way" and the next article will be for, "the slightly harder way".

Read more to find out why I did it, and how you can do it as well.

How on earth is this useful? 

As many people are now, I download files via BitTorrent.  All the usual stuff, but nothing illegal of course.

The problem I was having is when I download I want it to come in FAAAST so I was opening up my connection to Azureus a lot and making everything else on the network slow.  Melissa and myself both VNC to our computers from work all day and when the connection is fully used that makes for a bad remote desktop experience.   There is nothing worse then remote desktop'ing home with a 56k cell phone connection to a flooded home cable pipe.  This has solved my problem nicely.

If you build it, it will download. 

I am a recent Mac convert.  My new computer has allowed me to eliminate a lot of additional PCs in the house.  Anytime I can use software other then Windows I am tickled so with this project I took a lot of advice from Ross from the Nerdica article and used Ubuntu Linux as my core.  I cobbled together a old PC I thought was dead and took the plunge.

I have a PC, now what. 

Download Ubuntu from the website, burn yourself a copy of it and shove it in the cd drive of your new Torrent machine.  Reboot and run the live disc.  Eventually you will be presented with a Ubuntu desktop.  If this is your first experience with Linux or a different operating system poke around.  The computer is running off the cd so you can't hurt anything.  Well you feel ready, click install on the desktop and you are off to the races.

The defaults are fine for most everything on the setup.  Eventually it will ask you to reboot and then Bobs your Uncle.  You now have Ubuntu as a OS in your home.  Now, let's move on to making it do something aside from look pretty.