CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sshproxytorrent
G-Mos
G-Mos

Reputation: 183

rtorrent through a proxy

It's not that much of a question, rather a confirmation that what I did is right or not and if it is safe or not. Until now what I have found googling around is that you cannot run rtorrent through a proxy. You can either put the http request through a proxy, or tsocks, in both cases either the actual transfers are done directly or not done at all. Therefore until now the only proposed viable solution is a VPN which I wanted to avoid.

What I did was use an http proxy for the http part and a port forwarding for the actual download part. For example, lets assume the following:

Procedure:

  1. I created 2 ssh tunnels

    ssh -N -D 9090 [email protected]

    ssh -R 9091:localhost:9091 [email protected]

  2. From the local machine I installed polipo as the html proxy and configured it to use a socks proxy in the remote.machine.com. I edited the following lines in /etc/polipo/config so that I can get the socks proxy.

    socksParentProxy = "localhost:9090"

    socksProxyType = socks5

  3. I also changed the html proxy port for extra security, again in /etc/polipo/config

    proxyPort = 9080

  4. On the local machine I changed the ~/.rtorrent.rc as following:

    #Proxy of the http requests through polipo

    http_proxy=localhost:9080

    # The ip address reported to the tracker.

    #Really important, in order to get connections for downloads

    ip = remote.machine.com

    # The ip address the listening socket and outgoing connections is

    # bound to.

    bind = 192.168.1.10

    # Port range to use for listening.

    port_range = 9091-9091

    # Start opening ports at a random position within the port range.

    port_random = no

The system seems to work. I connect to the trackers and I have up and down traffic. So the questions are:

Upvotes: 2

Views: 7381

Answers (1)

koniiiik
koniiiik

Reputation: 4382

As far as I see, you have covered inbound connections, as well as outgoing HTTP traffic, but any outbound peer-to-peer connections will be created directly, not through any tunnel. Currently, rtorrent does not appear to support passing outbound P2P connections through a tunnel or proxy of any kind, so in order to handle these, you'll need some other mechanism.

You mentioned tsocks and that it does not work – not even in addition to the rtorrent configuration you have set up above? (Although with tsocks you should be able to drop the HTTP proxy part.)

If that fails, there are alternatives to tsocks mentioned on the tsocks project page. A slightly more involved alternative would be to create a new loopback interface (lo:1 with IP 127.0.0.2), bind your rtorrent to that one and use something like sshuttle to direct all traffic originating on that interface through an SSH tunnel. Unfortunately, sshuttle doesn't let you restrict its operation to a specific interface at the moment, though, so you'd have to fiddle with the iptables rules it creates to make them match your needs. I assume a patch adding this feature to sshuttle would be welcome.

As a side note, you can create multiple port forwards and SOCKS proxies in a single SSH connection, like this:

ssh -N -D 9090 -R 0.0.0.0:9091:localhost:9091 [email protected]

Upvotes: 2

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