Over the years I’ve tried several torrent clients on my Ubuntu server.
Since it’s an old 1Ghz P4 work horse, I prefer to run things “headless”.

The username used here is “yourname”, replace that with your own user name.
You also might want to check on the utorrent website for an updated version first.

Step 1 – get the uTorrent archive and unpack


$ cd /home/yourname/
$ wget http://download.utorrent.com/linux/utorrent-server-3.0-25053.tar.gz
$ tar xzf utorrent-server-3.0-25053.tar.gz


Check the unpacked directory with the “ls” command, there should be a folder called “utorrent-server-v3_0″.

Step 2 – create a startup script

The script below is the startup script you need to run utserver automatically on startup.
Credit for the script goes to simonbcn.

Get the script here, and save it as /etc/init.d/utserver

Don’t forget to modify the CHDIR and NAME values in the script!

In our case, the CHDIR would be “/home/yourname/utorrent-server-v3_0″ and the USER would be “yourname”

Step 3 – run the script on startup

Make it executable:


$ sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/utserver


Tell your system to run this script on startup:


$ sudo update-rc.d utserver defaults


Now reboot your system to check if this works.
If all went well, you can access the WebGUI on http://yourserverip:8080/gui from inside your LAN.

Step 4 – configure uTorrent

Now next thing to do, is setup the uTorrent Sever in the Preferences window:

You will probably want to set a name, password and your own listening port for the WebGUI.
When you’re done, visit the new page and log in (in my case http://yourserverip:12090/gui).
Then configure the uTorrent Server to your liking!

Make sure your download directories are writable, most common errors have to do with file permissions!

There are probably a lot of ways to scan downloaded files after completion in Ubuntu.
I run an old P4 download server with Ubuntu, and I want to scan my downloads for virusses before I use them on a Windows machine.
I installed Avast, which has command line access to the scanner.
I use Deluge (for its great WebUi) and for some reason the “execute on completion” plugin did not work.

In my case, Deluge moves completed downloads to “/storage”

Here’s my solution: I installed dnotify and use it to trigger Avast.

dnotify -C /storage -r -e avast -p=1 /storage

…will trigger a scan of the folder, right after a file has been created.
-C is to trigger an event on file creation
-r is for recursive monitoring
-e is the command that needs to be executed
“avast -p=1 /storage” is to run an Avast virus scan.
Warning: the “-p=1″ option deletes infected files without warning.

You can replace the directory “/storage” with your own.

I know, the method is rude – but it works like a charm.