TomatoUSB

So after I figured out that I need to use build 101 or earlier of Shibby's AIO, because 102 and 104 have a bug which makes them incompatible with an RT-N16 I finally got Tomato on my router, and set up my first torrents.

I quickly ran into some issues though.

First issue… apart from the web interface, how do I access transmission torrent from my Windows desktop given that there is no PC version? Do I use Transmission-Qt Win?

If I do use TransmissionQT, how do I add a torrent such that it saves to the router's mounted USB drive? When I open a torrent it asks me for a destination folder, defaulting to one on my PC? Defeats the purpose of setting up a stand-alone torrent box if it saves locally…

Second issue, after adding some torrents from the web UI they all started downloading but soon stopped for lack of space. I turned off the router, pulled the USB disk and checked. The USB drive had plenty of space on it, and the partially downloaded files did not appear to be on it. They weren't saving to my computer as far as I could tell because the downloads continued when I turned the PC off. Are they saving to the RAM of the router itself instead of the USB drive?

Presumably I can create my own folder to save them to on the USB drive which I then specify. How do I do that? Do I need to make the folder myself (in Windows, then plug it in to the router and specify that as the destination folder) or will it make the directory. Do I use a drive letter or just something like "/downloaded"?

Third issue…

After I turned the router back on and tried to open the torrent web interface again, it says:

"403: Forbidden

Unauthorized IP Address.

Either disable the IP address whitelist or add your address to it.

If you're editing settings.json, see the 'rpc-whitelist' and 'rpc-whitelist-enabled' entries.

If you're still using ACLs, use a whitelist instead. See the transmission-daemon manpage for details."

I Googled that and found various people doing various things with Linux and writing scripts and things, but is there a simpler way?

I cleared the settings but still got an error with transmission. I was getting

Connection Failed
Could not connect to the server. You may need to reload the page to reconnect.

This is a message I got previously, before it started giving the 403 message.

Now if there is one thing I hate about trying to find solutions online, it's posts like the one I just wrote without answers, because the next guy to have this issue will note others with the problem but never find out how it was done. When I find an answer out I always return to the post and write about it. Hope this is useful to you future Internet help seeker! ;)

To resolve the "Connection failed" problem, I had to enable Telnet on my PC (disabled by default in Windows 8)
Then I opened cmd and ran telnet.
To open the router I typed "o 192.168.1.1"
Then I killed the transmission daemon by sending it a kill string: "sen killall transmission-daemon".

After that I could connect to it again, I no longer got the Connection Failed error when I tried to open the web interface and it seems to be happily downloading torrents now.

I changed the download directory to /mnt/<my drive label>/<download directory> So far so good.

I still haven't figured out how to get TransmissionQT to control transmission on the router and download to the router's USB drive. Anyone know about that?

Just letting you guys know that I managed to get this working. The torrents actually were automatically picked up by Transmission QT after I'd uploaded them via the web interface. I don't know why this wasn't happening previously, but at least it works now.

And again to answer my own question for the benefit of that guy from the future who Googled this, the save location starts with "/mnt", that being the root directory of your mounted USB drive. Having a directory in there would be, for example, "/mnt/downloadfolder"

Hope this helps. ;)