Turnkey Torrents and Swedish Internets

A few months ago, I wrote about using a Turnkey Linux OpenVPN appliance to route network traffic thru Sweden. Since that time I have gotten my BitTorrent machine running. The other post was mostly about getting the VPN tunneling and routing to work. This post will mostly be about setting up the torrent server.

The Turnkey Torrent Server is neat because it’s a minimal Debian machine with a pre-configured Transmission BitTorrent Client, a web interface for managing BitTorrent, a working Samba server, and a webDAV client so you can use a browser to download files. Basically, you use the web interface to grab things, the Samba server to makes them accessible to your media players on your internal network, and webDAV makes the files accessible to the rest of the world, assuming you have the right ports forwarded. My preferred method for watching torrented videos is on a PC plugged into a TV running VLC Media player controlled with a wireless keyboard. I know I should be using Plex and shit like that, but I’m old school.

The Swedish Connection
For some of my friends who aren’t pirates (especially the friends that are into British TV) I am like their coke dealer except I deal in movies and TV shows. That means that sometimes I get asked to find things when I’m not at home. Like a third of my remote access shenanigans, A.K.A. reverse telecommuting, is so that I can pull up BitTorrent and snarf shit for friends and relatives when I’m not at home. Being able to expose the uTorrent remote interface to the web was great for letting my more technical non-hacker friends grab torrents without any assistance from me.

My VPN provider gives me the option of forwarding ports. When I was running uTorrent on a dedicated Windows machine, those forwarded ports were easy to configure. I would just set them up on the VPN site and map them to the ports I configured in uTorrent. One was for BitTorrent transfers to make sure that my ratios reported correctly on private trackers. The other was for the uTorrent web interface. For a long time I ran Windows for torrenting because I used PeerBlock to help me fly under the radar. Times change tho. Real time block lists is old and busted. VPNs is the new hotness. Unfortunately, with this VPN router setup it messes up forwarding ports. When I set up port forwarding on the VPN provider side, the forwarded ports hit the doorway server rather than the torrent server, so that has to be fixed with more IPTables kung fu on the doorway server.

I know I said that I wasn’t going to write anymore about the doorway server, but I lied. I needed to configure the doorway server to open those ports and then forward them to the torrent server. Let’s assume that my internal network is a 192.168.1.0/24 subnet (a class A block, a range of addresses from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.0.254) with a default gateway of 192.168.1.1. All of my traffic goes through my local router and hits the Internet from my ISP, in the US. If a device asks for an IP via DHCP, this is the network configuration that it will receive, along with red-blooded American Internets. Here is an awful network diagram because why not?

The doorway server has a static IP of 192.168.1.254 and it’s configured to route all of its traffic through the VPN tunnel to Sweden. Any device that is configured to have a default gateway of 192.168.1.254 will also hit the Internet via the tunnel to Sweden, thereby receiving Swedish Internets. At this point, all the configuration is done, and your torrent server will work, but there won’t be any ports forwarded to it, which is lame. No forwarded ports is especially lame when you are using private trackers because it can really mess with your ratios. Now, you could just open a port on your firewall for the web interface on the American side, but that’s also pretty lame. If you want to use your torrent server, you should strictly be using Swedish Internets.

Welcome to Swedish Internet
To forward those ports, first set them up in Transmission, then with your VPN provider. The web interface port [12322] is already configured for you by Turnkey Linux. You can set the other port in the Preferences->Network->Listening Port blank. Once the entry points and the end points are configured, it’s time to do more iptables kung fu.

Let’s assume the following:

1. The web interface port for Transmission is 12322.
2. The listening port in Transmission to 9001.
3. The static IP for your torrent server is 192.168.1.10
4. The doorway server IP is 192.168.1.254.
5. The forwarding ports you were able to get from your VPN provider are 9000 and 9001.
6. You want to use port 9000 on the VPN side for the Transmission web interface.
7. You wand to use port 9001 on the VPN side for the Transmission listening port.

What needs to happen is for the VPN tunnel interface (tun0) to listen on ports 9000 and 9001, then forward traffic on those ports to 192.168.1.10. Then, you want any traffic on those same ports that comes from the doorway’s internal network interface (eth0) to be modified so that it doesn’t look like it came from the tunnel interface. This is super important for TCP handshakes.

First create your rules for accepting/forwarding connections on the VPN side:

iptables -A FORWARD -i tun0 -o eth0 -p tcp --syn --dport 9000 -m conntrack --ctstate NEW -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i tun0 -o eth0 -p udp --dport 9001 -m conntrack --ctstate NEW -j ACCEPT

This was probably configured fine in the doorway server post, but this specifically allows all the traffic that passes between your VPN and the local network connections once a connection is establshed:

iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o tun0 -m conntrack --ctstate ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i tun0 -o eth0 -m conntrack --ctstate ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

Now add the rules to rewrite packets destined to the web interface and then rewrite the responses:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i tun0 -p tcp --dport 9000 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.1.10:12322
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -p tcp --dport 9000 -d 192.168.1.10 -j SNAT --to-source 192.168.1.254

Add the rules to rewrite all the BitTorrent packets, including responses:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i tun0 -p udp --dport 9001 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.1.10:9001
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -p udp --dport 9001 -d 192.168.38.37 -j SNAT --to-source 192.168.1.254

All the strict rewriting probably isn’t a big deal for the BitTorrent traffic because it’s UDP, and UDP don’t give a fuck.

If it’s working, point your browser to https://the-ip-address-of-your-vpn-server:9000 and you should be prompted to log in to the web interface. Once you’re sure it’s all good, then it’s time to save your working iptables config:

iptables-save | tee /etc/iptables.up.rules

Make sure that your rules work well after you reboot your VM. And then run your backups to make sure that they have your latest config because there’s nothing worse than trying to piece all this crap together for the third time.

You can skip having to remember the IP by registering it as a subdomain somewhere, either with a dynamic DNS service, or with the registrar for a domain that you own.

In the unlikely event that I made this, or any other technical thing look easy, rest assured that it took me at least a couple hours. Also, I had it working a months ago, but I forgot to update my snapshot and had to redo it again because I am not a smart man. Then during this second go around I had to restore the VM from a backup because iptables just isn’t my bag. Thankfully BitTorrent is my bag. Happy pirating!