I have this great method of torrenting that:
1) Does not involve installing any package manger on your Mac.
2) Does not involve installing any VPN or torrent client on your Mac, but still discretely gets you the file you want in the end.
3) Works probably from TenFourFox and up (even PPC).
OK, how? This is going to get really cheeky...
How It Works
========
So there is this amazing feature in qBittorrent called the WebUI. What this does is allow you to set up a local web server. This web server allows you to paste in magenet links, or upload .torrent files from your local machine to whatever your running qBittorrent on, and then it downloads it to your target location on the remote computer. So yes, you need 2 computers. But with even my MacBook 2,1 being a canidate to run the latest Fedora Linux (Gnome default ISO) I'm sure all of you reading this has at least one computer capable of this. In my case, I'm using Fedora Linux on my Mac Mini late 2012 as the remote computer. It is triple booted with Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows 7. And you can follow the same guide pretty much to even triple boot Mac OS X 10.4-10.7, Windows XP, and the latest Fedora Linux on the earliest Intel Macs if you don't want to loose your current OS.
The Setup
======
1) Install an OS that can run the latest qBittorrent (or if your risk profile is less, whatever version you can).
2) Install a VPN. VPN ads on YouTube give them a horrible reputation because they exaggerate/encourage the wrong use cases. But for torrenting Linux ISOs in complete privacy with a dedicated machine, you want one. I use Mullvad VPN because you can buy one month at a time for ~$5 USD. YOU WANT TO BUY ONE MONTH AT A TIME, because of something I've never seen discussed before. Mullvad gives you basically a unique account number, and you enter no personal info or even have a password. And because it is one month, trust me it is literally impossible to get rate limited. I tried PIA and other VPNs, when you buy their "ONE YEAR DISCOUNT" you get rate limited and your downloads crawl by month 3 because their is a secreat amount they will give you full speed. By constantly buying one months worth of Mullvad, deleting the account when time runs out, then buying another new account that isn't linked you always get very impressive speeds.
3) OK. VPN aquired, and qBittorent running. Open the VPN preferences and make sure you setup to only accept internet connections from the VPN. That way nothing leaks from your true IP. You need to make sure you allow local network connections, because you'll soon be running the web interface for this software and need to access that on your local network devices (iPhone, TenFourFox, whatever). Mullvad VPN's official app has an easy way to set this.
4) You now want to set qBittorrent to only accept network connections from your VPN interface. This means even if your firewall in the VPN fails, it is literally impossible for qBittorrent to access the internet from anything but the VPN connection. This is like `wg0-mullvad'.
5) Finally setup the web interface (WebUI) in qBittorrent. By default it is port 8080 which is fine. Even if your running a local web server, that usually is port 80 on a computer in your local network. Set a good password, because anything in your LAN will be able to access this.
6) You need next to be able to SCP into this remote computer. Chances are if your on a legacy platform you'll encounter some issues. My preferred solution is Legacy SSH Enabler. This is essentially the "nuclear option" and allows any device, Mac OS 9, iOS 4, Mac OS X 10.4, with ancient SSH/SFTP to access newer platforms with the latest versions of SSH/SFTP. This makes sense to me because even if the IP of said device changes due to OS re-install or whatever it still works. There is many other ways to do this like a whitelist, but I hate the incompatibility in general, it's all local network traffic (I don't expose anything to the internet in a SSH/SFTP server way), and yea this is my software...
7) OK so you should have:
* Modern OS on remote computer.
* qBittorrent with WebUI, Network Interface set to VPN only on remote computer.
* VPN setup with all firewall options, but allowing local network connections.
* SFTP/SSH access from legacy machines (client) to said host (the above remote computer).
You are ready to go.
Usage
====
1) You need a semi-up-to-date browser for this to work. Probably TenFourFox is the lowest I'd go to. But anything from the last decade I'd expect to handle this job just fine. This does mean you can also use your iPhone Air to access it the same way with Safari+SFTP apps too if you want to go there.
2) With said browser, go to <your computer IP>:8080 while connected to the same WiFi/LAN as this modern remote computer. Put in your password+username
3) Once you get there, you'll have an interface. You can upload .torrent files or copy+pate magnet URLs you acquire from your "host" (old Mac or whatever your using) and pick where they download:
4) Finally, you can use like Cyberduck to go to the download location and get them onto your "client" (old mac or whatever) and $ profit.
I get this is a very high-level, not too in depth tutorial but with what I've provided, you will be able to do research on say "How to setup WebUI in qBittorrent", "How to specify network interface in qBittorrent", or whatever wasn't gone into much depth. But I just kinda started doing this and it's been great, no one talks about this method. I hope you download every Linux ISO in existence.
This also goes for other Legacy OSes. Windows XP has Superium, basically the chromium-legacy (what I'm using above) equivalent for Windows XP. Anything that can access your "linux distro website" and also run the qBittorrent WebUI will work. With Windows XP the last XP compatible WinSCP version is basically Cyberduck equivelent. And completely unrelated, but VLC's latest version minimums are Mac OS X 10.7 and Windows XP. You just need the hardware to back it up.
1) Does not involve installing any package manger on your Mac.
2) Does not involve installing any VPN or torrent client on your Mac, but still discretely gets you the file you want in the end.
3) Works probably from TenFourFox and up (even PPC).
OK, how? This is going to get really cheeky...
How It Works
========
So there is this amazing feature in qBittorrent called the WebUI. What this does is allow you to set up a local web server. This web server allows you to paste in magenet links, or upload .torrent files from your local machine to whatever your running qBittorrent on, and then it downloads it to your target location on the remote computer. So yes, you need 2 computers. But with even my MacBook 2,1 being a canidate to run the latest Fedora Linux (Gnome default ISO) I'm sure all of you reading this has at least one computer capable of this. In my case, I'm using Fedora Linux on my Mac Mini late 2012 as the remote computer. It is triple booted with Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows 7. And you can follow the same guide pretty much to even triple boot Mac OS X 10.4-10.7, Windows XP, and the latest Fedora Linux on the earliest Intel Macs if you don't want to loose your current OS.
The Setup
======
1) Install an OS that can run the latest qBittorrent (or if your risk profile is less, whatever version you can).
2) Install a VPN. VPN ads on YouTube give them a horrible reputation because they exaggerate/encourage the wrong use cases. But for torrenting Linux ISOs in complete privacy with a dedicated machine, you want one. I use Mullvad VPN because you can buy one month at a time for ~$5 USD. YOU WANT TO BUY ONE MONTH AT A TIME, because of something I've never seen discussed before. Mullvad gives you basically a unique account number, and you enter no personal info or even have a password. And because it is one month, trust me it is literally impossible to get rate limited. I tried PIA and other VPNs, when you buy their "ONE YEAR DISCOUNT" you get rate limited and your downloads crawl by month 3 because their is a secreat amount they will give you full speed. By constantly buying one months worth of Mullvad, deleting the account when time runs out, then buying another new account that isn't linked you always get very impressive speeds.
3) OK. VPN aquired, and qBittorent running. Open the VPN preferences and make sure you setup to only accept internet connections from the VPN. That way nothing leaks from your true IP. You need to make sure you allow local network connections, because you'll soon be running the web interface for this software and need to access that on your local network devices (iPhone, TenFourFox, whatever). Mullvad VPN's official app has an easy way to set this.
4) You now want to set qBittorrent to only accept network connections from your VPN interface. This means even if your firewall in the VPN fails, it is literally impossible for qBittorrent to access the internet from anything but the VPN connection. This is like `wg0-mullvad'.
5) Finally setup the web interface (WebUI) in qBittorrent. By default it is port 8080 which is fine. Even if your running a local web server, that usually is port 80 on a computer in your local network. Set a good password, because anything in your LAN will be able to access this.
6) You need next to be able to SCP into this remote computer. Chances are if your on a legacy platform you'll encounter some issues. My preferred solution is Legacy SSH Enabler. This is essentially the "nuclear option" and allows any device, Mac OS 9, iOS 4, Mac OS X 10.4, with ancient SSH/SFTP to access newer platforms with the latest versions of SSH/SFTP. This makes sense to me because even if the IP of said device changes due to OS re-install or whatever it still works. There is many other ways to do this like a whitelist, but I hate the incompatibility in general, it's all local network traffic (I don't expose anything to the internet in a SSH/SFTP server way), and yea this is my software...
7) OK so you should have:
* Modern OS on remote computer.
* qBittorrent with WebUI, Network Interface set to VPN only on remote computer.
* VPN setup with all firewall options, but allowing local network connections.
* SFTP/SSH access from legacy machines (client) to said host (the above remote computer).
You are ready to go.
Usage
====
1) You need a semi-up-to-date browser for this to work. Probably TenFourFox is the lowest I'd go to. But anything from the last decade I'd expect to handle this job just fine. This does mean you can also use your iPhone Air to access it the same way with Safari+SFTP apps too if you want to go there.
2) With said browser, go to <your computer IP>:8080 while connected to the same WiFi/LAN as this modern remote computer. Put in your password+username
3) Once you get there, you'll have an interface. You can upload .torrent files or copy+pate magnet URLs you acquire from your "host" (old Mac or whatever your using) and pick where they download:
I get this is a very high-level, not too in depth tutorial but with what I've provided, you will be able to do research on say "How to setup WebUI in qBittorrent", "How to specify network interface in qBittorrent", or whatever wasn't gone into much depth. But I just kinda started doing this and it's been great, no one talks about this method. I hope you download every Linux ISO in existence.
This also goes for other Legacy OSes. Windows XP has Superium, basically the chromium-legacy (what I'm using above) equivalent for Windows XP. Anything that can access your "linux distro website" and also run the qBittorrent WebUI will work. With Windows XP the last XP compatible WinSCP version is basically Cyberduck equivelent. And completely unrelated, but VLC's latest version minimums are Mac OS X 10.7 and Windows XP. You just need the hardware to back it up.
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