User:Backyardbanana/Qbittorrent usage

BitTorrent the peer to peer file sharing protocol is often used in the Linux world to distribute .iso files and often times larger source code. In order to download this way a client is needed.The popular torrent client qbittorent is very well respected and used by many people not only members of the Linux community. They do this for many reasons,some of them being

• FOSS(Free and Open Source Software)
  • Private
• Lightweight
• Bitcoin Miner free
• Its great cross compatibility
• Features

Some of these features are misunderstood or often times go unused this article attempts to breakdown the installation, configuration and usage of the most popular FOSS bittorrent client in use today.

Installation

The installation of qbittorrent is installed by the package / qbittorrent

sudo pacman -S qbiittorent 

Many consider a base package install to be more then enough some may want to compile and customize the applications themself. Manually compaling also allows for a new version or a feature rigth after it has been pushed on github if you would like to beta test it is best to compile it yourself, as arch will have the latest stable version of that package. In order to compile qbittorrent, we must make sure we the prerequisites installed properly. The requested packages arch / boost , / openssl , / zlib , / pk-config , / qt5-svg, and finally / python . The package can now be built. The Qt requisite as described in qbittorrent documentation can be installed as / qt . This is the base package and will allow qbittorrent to compile as it should.

./configure 

make && make install 

qbiittorent 

Tips and tricks

The rest of this guide will cover the explanation of two important and standout features of qbittorrent

• Interface binding

Interface binding is a qbittorrent feature that allows the application to only communicate with one interface such as , wlan0, eth0 , tun0 etc. This is a interesting and important feature because it allows the user to use only one. Such as a better wireless card is plunged in via usb for better speeds. qbittorrent could be set up so it only uses the faster interface for its torrents. Although that is a niche use case its most common is vpn binding. By making the client only communicate with tun0 it helps mitigate the risk of a connection drop and ip address leakage to the torrent swarm. A very practical and useful feature more people should use and know about

• Anonymous Mode

This a mode that qbittorrent has set off by default this is mode that will help maintain a certain level of anonymity on the torrent swarm. More of its useful features are described / here . However this a double edged sword. This will severely decrease your speeds. it is a compromise between privacy and anonimity vs speed. Speed often times will be cut in half. However with other anonymizing methods such as Virtual Private Network, proxy's and even i2p

Risk

Privacy a Linux community core value may be put at risk in the torrent swarm. Even when only torreting only free software. There are a few ways the end user can protect their privacy. We see many diffrent kinds of dangers such as

1. DMCA Notices
2. Copyright Trolls
3. ISP Throttling

Risk management

• VPN While many people will disagree with who the best vpn for linux is when torrenting it is often just important to use one. It will create a encrypted connection to a server whose ip address with be seen not yours . This can help protect you from many of the issues. Your ISP can not see your actives , and while not fool proof is much better.
• I2P This anonymous network fully supports torrents and it is much different then tor

See all

https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/wiki - qbittorents wiki
https://geti2p.net/en/ - i2p