Update #1 (Aug 19, 2018):
With the passage of time, things change and in this case it is mostly for the better. I was setting up the Pi once again and was pleasantly surprised that some of the workarounds mentioned previously are no longer needed. Thus, I have edited the original tutorial to accommodate these changes while striking out the old text.
Also, after comparison, I found AB-Solution to be a better solution for network-wide ad blocking, if you happen to have a Merlin supported Asus router like I do. Since the router is on 24×7, having an old ext2 formatted pen drive plugged in to the router itself and running ab-solution is a better alternative as against running the Pi 24×7. It also has various preset ad blocking files that suit different needs while pixelserv-tls does a great job with HTTPS ads.
Lastly, I failed to mention the option of having a Samba server running on the Pi itself in order to access the files directly from the pen drive over the network. This can be accomplished by simply following the official tutorial on the Raspberry Pi website.
Original Article (May 3, 2018):
I had previously shared some tutorials in setting up the Pi and putting it to good use. However, the use cases I mentioned then have ceased to exist. The Fire TV has taken care of most of my multimedia needs and I have come to realise that I really don’t have much time to go back in time for nostalgia. For the retro needs that remain, the lesser-used Core M 5Y10 equipped Windows tablet of mine does a much better job plugged in to the TV.
Hence, it is time to put the Pi to good use in a different sense. Thankfully, the versatility of the Pi means that it is not difficult to identify its next project. Ads can become a nuisance, especially for the more aged members of the family and hence my first intent was to set up an ad blocker across my home network. However, putting the Pi to such limited use and keeping it on 24/7 would be quite a waste, so I decided to also repurpose it as a download box with centralised storage.
Setting up the tools necessary to accomplish these tasks seemed straightforward. However, the relevancy of publicly available tutorials diminish over time due to changes in technology. In fact, I had to put quite some effort beyond the listed tutorials and hence I have decided to put the same to words for posterity.
Before starting out:
PINN is a great utility when multi-booting across different distributions on the same SD card. However, Raspbian alone fits the bill for the current use case. Hence, writing the raw Raspbian image directly on the card is preferable as it provides more usable space. As far as writing on the card goes, Etcher is the way to go.
1. Pi-hole®
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
However, I made a couple of settings that are worth mentioning:
a. The predefined list of upstream DNS providers does not yet include Cloudflare which I found to be the fastest of the lot. Hence, it would be worthwhile to use the custom option and enter the Cloudflare DNS Server IP addresses of 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1.
b. The other part of the equation is setting up the home equipment to use the local DNS server. In case of Asus routers, this implies changing the DNS Server IP address to the Pi-hole one, not only on the WAN page (under WAN DNS Settings) but also under LAN > DHCP Server > DNS and WINS Server Setting. Make sure that there are no other IP addresses present in either of the pages. You could also run the DHCP server on Pi-hole, in which case the latter setting is not needed. However, since I use the router-assigned IP addresses for other functions (eg. VPN), I prefer to have the DHCP server running on the router itself.
2. qBittorrent
qBittorrent has been my preferred Bittorrent client for quite some time with it being open-source and having proper support for proxies as against Transmission. It can be installed easily using APT, though I prefer the headless route.
sudo apt-get install qbittorrent-nox
My primary endeavour was to have the downloaded files ready on the USB 3.0 hard disk connected to my router (and thus acting like a NAS) while minimising the read-write operations. Since it is not a great idea to write to the SD card running the client, I decided to plug in an old 32 GB pen drive to act as the “working folder” by adding it under Downloads > Hard Disk > Keep incomplete torrents in:
The next part was to add the network drive as the final resting place by entering its address under Downloads > Hard Disk > Save files to location: and also under the Copy .torrent files for finished downloads to field. The latter is sometimes necessary due to some quirks in different versions of qBittorrent. The external network drive needs to be mounted within Raspbian on boot which can be accomplished by editing /etc/fstab with these details:
mount -t cifs //xx.xx.xx.xx/folder /media/NAS -o rw,vers=2.0,username=abc,password=xyz
//xx.xx.xx.xx/folder /media/NAS cifs vers=1.0,username=abc,password=xyz,x-systemd.automount
where,
xx.xx.xx.xx -> LAN IP address as configured on the router running the Samba server
folder -> Path to the folder on the network drive that needs to be mounted
/media/NAS -> Path on the Pi where the network drive is to be mounted
In my case, I had to specifically mention the SMB version (2.0), without which the mounting would fail as well as the rw argument to be able to write to the device. Also. it is a good idea to update the cifs-util package from APT prior to editing the fstab file, as mentioned above.
Note: The earlier entry no longer worked with the June 2018 version of Raspbian due to which I had to use the alternative entry in /etc/fstab mentioned above. Also, I was only able to get v1.0 working this time despite the server supporting v2.0 as well.
Finally, to cover for unexpected reboots, it is preferable to have qBittorrent autostart which can be accomplished using systemd. First, create the startup script using:
sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/qbittorrent.service
Next, enter its contents as follows:
[Unit]
Description=qBittorrent Daemon Service
After=network.target
[Service]
User=pi
ExecStart=/usr/bin/qbittorrent-nox
ExecStop=/usr/bin/killall -w qbittorrent-nox
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Lastly, enable the script.
sudo systemctl enable qbittorrent
3. pyLoad
The final part of the exercise was to set up a download manager. I had briefly given thought to JDownloader but decided against running JRE just for it. Hence, I opted for pyLoad instead. The tutorial listed over here works fine for the most part but needed quite some tweaks along the way. For the sake of completion, I will list all the steps in brief.
1. Create system user for pyload
sudo adduser –system pyload
2. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list to be able to install the dependencies. For Raspbian Stretch, the source URLs are as follows:
deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ stretch main contrib non-free rpi
deb-src http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/ stretch main contrib non-free rpi
3. Update package list and install dependencies.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install git liblept4 python python-crypto python-pycurl python-imaging tesseract-ocr zip unzip python-openssl libmozjs-24-bin
sudo apt-get -y build-dep rar unrar-nonfree
sudo apt-get source -b unrar-nonfree
sudo dpkg -i unrar_*_armhf.deb
sudo rm -rf unrar-*
4. Create symlink to get “spidermonkey” working.
cd /usr/bin
sudo ln -s js24 js
5. Unlike in the linked tutorial, I had to first switch to the stable branch before I could initiate the pyLoad setup. This is done as follows:
cd /opt
sudo git clone https://github.com/pyload/pyload.git
cd pyload
git branch -r
git checkout stable
6. The next step, as per the linked tutorial, should have been the initiation of the pyLoad setup using:
sudo -u pyload python pyLoadCore.py
However, doing so produced the following error: “ImportError: No module named pycurl“. Hence the next logical step was to install pycurl:
sudo pip -v install pycurl –upgrade
This in turn resulted in the error: “InstallationError: Command “python setup.py egg_info” failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-build-IsWfyN/pycurl/“. This was resolved by:
sudo apt-get install libcurl4-gnutls-devpip
As you can now guess, this in turn resulted in yet another error: “Failed building wheel for pycurl” which was remedied as follows:
sudo apt-get install libgnutls28-dev
After all this effort, I was finally able to install pycurl using the command mentioned previously…
sudo pip -v install pycurl –upgrade
…and execute the pyLoad setup using a slightly shorter command:
python pyLoadCore.py
On the June 2018 release, I was able to get pyload wizard started by executing
sudo -u pyload python pyLoadCore.py
The final tweak was to get pyLoad running on boot with the commands executed in a manner similar to what has been already covered for qBittorrent.
sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/pyload.service
[Unit]
Description=Python Downloader
After=network.target
[Service]
User=pyload
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python /opt/pyload/pyLoadCore.py
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
sudo systemctl enable pyload.service
Beyond Home
The benefits of this setup can be extended beyond the home network, though a lot depends on the vagaries of the network setup.
Pi-hole can be put to use on external networks by accessing the home network over OpenVPN, though speed and latency might be factors to consider. It can also be setup as a Public DNS but it is extremely risky and not at all recommended.
qBittorrent and pyLoad can be simply accessed using the IP address and port, provided they have been setup to be accessible from outside the LAN. For dynamic IP addresses, the Dynamic DNS (DDNS) option available on most routers can be put to use and my suggestion would be to pick up a cheap $1 domain from NameCheap for this purpose. However, if you happen to be under a multi-layered NAT network under ISP control like me, then there is no option other than to pay for a static IP for public access.
Thankfully, there is a last resort to access the Pi over a public network. The licensed copy of RealVNC that comes with Raspbian offers Cloud Connect that enables one to remotely control the OS and thereby all applications on it. It is quite cumbersome to use if your intent is to only load some links on qBittorrent or pyLoad, but it is better than nothing.
Thus, the Pi can be extremely useful even when used in a rather sedentary capacity and you grow to appreciate the efforts that everyone has put in to make this possible.
