Torrent automation

[Humodour]

Since this forum has a bunch of rather cluey folks on it, I figured I'd pop the question here.

 

Namely, how would one go about trigger torrents to download on a computer remotely (i.e. from another computer over the Internet)?

 

I am reasonably skilled with PHP, SQL, JavaScript, Python, and can pick up bash quickly if needed.

 

My computers both run Ubuntu Linux (8.04 and soon 9.04) but ideally the computer triggering the download remotely should be able to be running any OS.

 

I was thinking of hosting some sort of FTP server at the computer doing the torrenting. Then I'd upload torrent hash files to a certain folder on that computer, and it would periodically check for new torrents, and if detected, download them. I imagine the last part is where bash or Python comes in handy? Problems may arise with dialogue boxes that require a response, however?

 

Any ideas?

[Humodour]

Just checked and both Opera and Transmission will download a torrent without spawning confirm dialogue boxes, and both will add new torrents to the queue if they're already running.

 

Unfortunately, however, if I use the command line terminal to open them (e.g. "transmission test.torrent"), the terminal will get stuck at that line until transmission closes. I have little experience with bash scripts, but wouldn't they suffer the same problem?

 

Whilst in Python I simply have no idea how to make it execute other programmes.

[Humodour]

Nevermind. My friend just suggested the pretty obvious solution of using a) command line over SSH, or b) running X server over SSH and accessing the entire visual desktop from another PC.

[Diamond]

I think running X remotely is an overkill. I just run rtorrent in a screen session. You can scp torrent files into a folder watched by rtorrent and it will automatically pick them up.

[Fionavar]

Just a reminder. P2P is just a tool. What you are sharing, however, can be problematic. So, let's keep this discussion on the side of caring for the creator's or art and technology and not devolve into advocating illegal dissemination ... make sense?