Headless torrentbox with ipblock

2008-02-14 2 min read Linux Networking Ubuntu Zachary Loeber

As you may or may not know there are a lot of people who seem to be interested in the torrent activities of others. Some just like to track, others are government agencies, and of course the RIAA. I personally don’t like this intrusion into my habits so I do my best to block their attempts. In this small tutorial I’m going to cover how to install torrentflux with ipblock and fail2ban in a headless mode so you can download and seed torrents a bit more securely.

This is going to assume you have an ubuntu 7.10 LAMP server already setup. Here we go!

First get the prerequisites:

apt-get install libnetfilter-queue1 libnfnetlink0

Get the iplist package here this package includes the ipblock software as well.

wget <link to ipblock software>

``Now since we are not using a front end we have to finagle the deb file so there aren’t any dependency issues with uninstalled graphical interfaces and tools.

dpkg-deb -x iplist_0.18-0gutsy1_i386.deb ./iplist_deb dpkg-deb -e iplist_0.18-0gutsy1_i386.deb iplist_deb/DEBIAN cd iplist_deb/DEBIAN/ nano ./control 

In the line that starts with “Depends:” get rid of the last three dependencies. So kill of the following at the end of the line:

", sun-java5-jre | sun-java6-jre, gksu"

Save and exit then rebuild the package

cd ../../ dpkg -b ./iplist_deb iplist_0.18-0gutsy1_i386.deb sudo dpkg -i iplist_0.18-0-headless_gusty_i386.deb

sudo cp /usr/share/doc/iplist/examples/ipblock.conf /etc/ sudo cp /usr/share/doc/iplist/examples/allow.p2p /etc/

sudo nano /etc/ipblock.conf

Set to start at boot (not sure if this actually works w/o the gui but it doesn’t hurt)

AUTOSTART="Yes"

Setup your blocklists based on your preferences from the files listed in /usr/share/doc/iplist/README.lists

BLOCK_LIST="level1.gz Microsoft.gz ads-trackers-and-bad-pr0n.gz spy bogon.gz templist.gz"

I also like to keep my logfiles in one tidy spot and thusly change the LOG_FILE variable as follows, but this is entirely personal preference.

LOG_FILE="/var/log/ipblock.log"

sudo ipblock -u sudo /etc/init.d/ipblock start sudo ipblock -l

Note: The updates run daily and the script can be found as /etc/cron.daily/ipblock Move or update this as you see fit, I like it updating daily though.

Finally make sure it starts at boot by checking with sysv-rc-conf or similar rc level tools.

Cheers!