Advanced Bittorrent question

[Grouchy]

First the situation; I would like to provide bittorrent to multiple workstations on a home LAN while restricting the actual downloading to a dedicated server.
windows PC windows PC windows PC --------- Linux server --------- Router - Cable Modem - Internet windows PC windows PC

The easy solution would be to use VNC clients on the workstations to get to the server, start browsing, start downloading/sharing, disconnect, reconnect a couple days later when done sharing, etc...

I was looking at Azureus's plug-ins to do remote SWING and HTTP management but it looks like both solutions require Azureus to already be running on the remote computer; I assume started manually unless it can be started through /init.d/ or something in a "headless" mode.

It's almost like I'm asking for a Bittorrent proxy; something invisible to clients where all traffic is centralized.

Anybody done or thought of something similar to this?

[Foosinho]

I'm running something called "TorrentFlux (http://www.torrentflux.com/)" on my server. It's a PHP/Python bittorrent client with an HTTP interface. You paste in URLs to torrents, or upload a torrent file, and the server will download the torrent to it's local disk. Then you can download the files locally via HTTP (if they are over 2GB you need the latest version of Apache with big file support) or a Samba share.

I'm the only person using Bittorrent on my LAN, but this means I don't have to tie up the desktop box (or even leave it on) to download stuff - so my wife can log me out and do her thing without disrupting my downloading/uploading.

I can't seem to get the queuing agent working correctly, so if I have a lot of downloads I may have to attend to in manually occasionally to start new torrents as old ones finish. Plus, I need to adjust my QoS rules, as the torrent traffic takes up just a smidge too much of my upstream bandwidth. (There are some mods that allow limiting the total upstream bandwidth used by your torrents, but I found it (combined with the built in per-torrent limits) lacking compared to QoS.)

I'm pretty happy with it.

[Grouchy]

My current setup is a Windows 2003 server running on a Shuttle mini-computer (the SK41G I've mentioned earlier in this forum); I remote desktop in, surf, start sharing using uTorrent, disconnect - pretty easy.

The D-Link "game fuel" router I have does QoS and all file sharing traffic is at lowest priority.

The benefits:
Extremely low power consumption, very little heat generated (++ considering recent conditions), simple
The drawbacks:
Only one or two remote desktop sessions

I'm moving to a Linux based IDEQ mini with twice the storage (512 to 1G, 200GB to 400GB). I'll have to give TorrentFlux a spin. If worse comes to worse I can simply go the VNC route to a low resource windows manager like Fluxbox...

Thanks