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Build a Torrent Machine and Network Share

by Aaron Crowder on in Raspberry Pi

When I first got a Raspberry Pi the first thing I wanted to build was a home server. I wanted to have a central place at home to store files. I also thought it would be nice to have a torrent machine to handle downloading whatever I wanted. This past weekend I was finally able to get around to building it with a Raspberry Pi 2.

I chose to use Diet Pi as my OS. Diet Pi is an OS that comes with only the bare essentials installed. On first boot it gives you a list of preconfigured software to install. This was perfect for me because I could install Samba for my file server and transmission for torrents. It made setting up what I wanted really easy.

The process actually was really simple. So this blog post won’t need to go into heavy technical detail. Instead, I just want to walk through the simple process of steps, with a couple of images, to document it for myself. Hopefully others benefit from this as well!

First I downloaded the Diet Pi image (based on Debian Jesse) and unziped it. Then I made sure my SD card was clean and ready to flash. I like to use the Windows CLI tool diskpart. You can see pretty simply the steps I took from the image below:

Cleaning my SD Card

Once my SD Card was clean, I formatted it:

Formatting my SD Card

It doesn’t matter what format you use because you’re going to reformat it when you write the image to the SD card (I use Win32DiskImager):

Write Image to SD Card

Notes

  • Install DietPi
  • Install relevant software thought dietpi installer
  • Configure softwares