Jeremy Davis's picture

Ideally, I would have preferred to keep the rTorrent/ruTorrent appliance and have the Transmission one alongside. But it wasn't to be.

There were a number of users who were really upset that we dropped rTorrent/ruTorrent, but we had way to many complaints about it being unstable. FWIW I couldn't ever reproduce the issues, but we had way to many reports for it to be in people's imagination.

What are the specs of your "always on" box? Assuming that it was built in the last <~10 years and has 2GB+ RAM, it may support Proxmox. The minimum hardware requirements are x86_64 (i.e. 64 bits) and VT-x/AMD-V cpu extensions. Unless it's one of the early old Atom CPUs, it should support 64 bit.

CPU virtualisation support is a slightly different (and messier) situation. AFAIK AMD have been providing AMD-V on all their chips since the Athlon 64 chips (circa early 2006). So if you have an AMD chip, you should be good.

Intel CPUs have VT-x instead, and their philosophy was a bit more scattered. They first provided it in the later high end Pentium 4 chips (circa late 2005). Many of the Core2Duo chips had it too, but not all of them. I used to have a high end Intel Core2Quad that didn't have it. If you have an Intel chip, I suggest you find out what it is and consult the internet to see if it supports it. Intel still provide the full specs on all their old CPUs last time I checked.

I mention Proxmox, because then you can run each server as it's own VM. So you get the redundancy of having multiple servers (which personally I like) but only need to leave one machine running. I ran a Proxmox server on an old desktop system for years and had up to 20 VMs running no problems (and one was even Windows!) The only reason why I ended upgrading was I was running out of RAM (I had upgrade it as far as possible; 8GB). My new Proxmox rig is a low power octocore Atom with 32 GB RAM. Each VM doesn't perform quite as well as it used to on the old server (slower CPU speed) but with 8 cores and 32GB RAM I have tons of headroom.

Personally, installing Proxmox was probably the single best thing I ever did when I first started exploring Linux (ok, finding TurnKey was probably the best, but it was close second). Being able to spin up a server, clone it, then trash it all in a matter of moments makes playing with Linux so much easier. No need to be scared of breaking things (so long as you have a backup first). And new things can be tried in a disposable VM (worst case, trash it, rinse and repeat).

Even if you'd rather not go that route, there are other ways to skin the cat. Samba can be installed too and whilst it isn't the easiest beast to configure, it's possible. As a hint, I suggest that you install the webmin-samba package as well to make it a little easier to configure.

Also, back when I was using Windows, I used to have WinSSHFS installed. That allows you to mount remote Linux directories over SSH (native and preinstalled on all TurnKey servers). Development had been abandoned and it was a little buggy (on Win7) when the computer woke up after being asleep, but otherwise worked fantastic. Last I checked, someone had adopted it and it was under development again. I assume that the bugs have been fixed.