Jeremy Davis's picture

Whilst it would be a cool combo, it's not something that I have ever done, so this will be a bit of a case of the blind leading the blind. Having said that, I've been using Linux exclusively for years now and I have deep insights into how TurnKey works, so hopefully I might provide some value... :)

Currently TurnKey servers are monolithic. I.e. each server comes as a single ISO (etc) which includes a complete Linux OS with specific software installed to achieve a specific ends (e.g. torrent server, OpenVPN, etc). We do have plans to switch our model and allow the easy combining of applications into a single server, but we're probably still quite a while away from that (sorry).

In the meantime, you have a few options. Which would be best will depend on where you are planning to run these services, the resources available, how much patience you have and how willing you are to do a deep dive into Linux. TBH, I learned most of what I know by playing with TurnKey years ago. Once I'd developed a bit of Linux experience, I started running it locally (as my desktop) and other than a few initial teething issues, I haven't looked back. Personally I now find Windows so painful to work with! But I digress...

Reading your message, I assume that you wish to run these services locally so I will continue with that assumption. If that's wrong, please correct me. Broadly speaking, you have 2 options:

  1. Install 2 separate TurnKey servers and configure the torrent server to connect to the internet via the VPN provided by the OpenVPN server.
  2. Start with one of the existing appliances and manually install and configure the additional software you wish to use.

Option #1 in some respects is not ideal, as you'll then have 2 separate servers to maintain and configure. IMO it's really only suitable if you have a host where you can run the servers as multiple VMs.

Despite the redundancy and additional overhead, personally I actually prefer that method. Although I have a home server which is a hypervisor (VM host; FWIW I'm running Proxmox) so I like the flexibility that having a raft of separate VMs gives me. Also seeing as Proxmox also provides LXC (Linux Containers - minimalist Linux VMs) I run a lot of stuff under LXC which is really light weight.

A slight variation of that theme would be to use the TurnKey LXC appliance. As per my mention of LXC above, it provides a way to host multiple TurnKey apps as LXC guests. Although LXC does have some limitations and I'm not 100% sure whether OpenVPN would run nicely on it?! (Although I haven't tested and the torrent server should be fine).

So depending on your circumstance, option #2 may be preferable? If I were to go that path, I'd probably start with the OpenVPN appliance because I don't know much about it and Transmission (the torrent client we provide in our current torrent server appliance) is relatively easy to install. But OTOH, I don't use Windows filesharing so wouldn't bother installing anything other than the torrent client, so YMMV.

For reference, the build code of these 2 appliances can be found on GitHub (torrent server & OpenVPN).

Installing Transmission on your OpenVPN server, should be as easy as:

apt-get update
apt-get install transmission-daemon 

You should find the config file in /etc/transmission. Please note that to change any config, please stop the service first, then restart after the changes have been made. Stop a service like this:

service trasmission-daemon stop

To start it again, replace "stop" with "start".

I know that I have really glossed over lots of details, but please feel free to ask specific questions and provide some more context and I'll try to help out as best I can.