- Downloaded
- 48.3 GB
- Uploaded
- 29.5 TB
- Ratio
- 624.51
- Seedbonus
- 327,857
- Upload Count
- 0 (0)
Member for 10 years
[Tutorial] Using Your ASUS Router As A Bit Torrent Client For Downloading/Seeding
After seeding 24/7 on a out dated power hungry core 2 quad system for almost a week, last night I woke up around 2:30 and just could not get back to sleep, stuck laying there thinking about how to better improve my ratio and earn those most sort after bonus points and what I should download next I realized something! I own an Asus RT-AC68U router!
I had purchased it for certain reasons and it had only just hit me now that is capable of running a bit torrent client using a built in USB3.0 port for stoarge. Now because I hadn't initially purchased with seeding in mind it had only just dawned on me now, that since my router runs 24/7 and seeding needs to be running 24/7 to better help those nice boys and girls over at TeamOS I can be seeding and not using extra power from having a pc running no matter energy efficient it may be because no PC running beats 1 PC running anytime of the day even if your house does have solar
I'd be a fool not to take advantage of this routers built in torrent client features which Asus calls "Download Master".
After a few some time this morning and the moving of around 50GB worth of already seeding torrents I had it all setup and seeding all my TeamOS tracked torrents which I will leave seeding until the end of days lol
I'm sure many other late model routers have a similar function but I will be relaying what i did using my router as mentioned above the "Asus RT-AC68U"
If you have a router with similar features please comment below listing which model of router you have along with it's firmware, I'm sure the admins here would appreciate that & it will be added to the list below of compatible routers
Compatible Routers Known So Far:
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ASUS:
4G-AC55U, 4G-AC68U, Blue Cave, CM-32, DSL-AC3100, DSL-AC52U, DSL-AC55U, DSL-AC56U, DSL-AC68R, DSL-AC68U, DSL-AC87VG, DSL-AC88U, DSL-AC88U-B, DSL-N14U, DSL-N14U-B1, DSL-N17U, DSL-N55U, DSL-N55U (VER.B1), DSL-N55U (VER.C1),
DSL-N55U_D1, DSL-N66U, GT-AC5300, GT-AX11000, ROG Rapture GT-AC2900, RT-AC1200GU, RT-AC1200HP, RT-AC1750_B1, RT-AC1900, RT-AC1900P, RT-AC2900, RT-AC3100, RT-AC3200, RT-AC51U, RT-AC51U+, RT-AC52U, RT-AC52U B1, RT-AC5300, RT-AC53U, RT-AC54U, RT-AC55U, RT-AC55UHP, RT-AC56S, RT-AC56U, RT-AC57U, RT-AC66U, RT-AC66U+, RT-AC66U-B1, RT-AC68A, RT-AC68P, RT-AC68U, RT-AC68UF, RT-AC68W, RT-AC85U, RT-AC86U, RT-AC87U, RT-AC88U, RT-AX3000, RT-AX56U, RT-AX58U, RT-AX88U, RT-AX89X, RT-AX92U, RT-N14U, RT-N14UHP, RT-N16, RT-N18U, RT-N56U, RT-N56U_B1, RT-N65U, RT-N66U (VER.B1), RT-N66U C1, RT-N66W, TUF-AX3000
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Prepping Your USB:
Before starting on the router we want to get our storage device to use in the router ready. Because the router supports USB 3.0 devices I have myself chosen to use one to get the best performance possible, however if you don't have one a 2.0 usb device will work just fine. A USB memory stick or portable hard drive that draws power from the usb port is highly recommended. I can confirm that with this router I am using the drive does NOT get formatted during this setup.
I have formatted my 64GB USB stick as NTFS (supports files over 4gb)
- if all the torrents you wish to download/seed are larger than 4gb you WILL need to format as NTFS in order to store the larger files, Note that when using a USB flash drive this can shorten the lifespan however since the drive will be plugged in on a 24/7 basis the risk is minimal so in my situation I'm not worried. Plus when i fill up this drive I will replace it with a portable hard drive.)
- if all the torrents you wish to download/seed are smaller than 4gb and your using a usb flash drive I recommend formatting as exFAT or FAT32 as the drive will last longer, most of the time a USB stick will come formatted as exFAT or FAT32 so you won't need to worry.)
Once your drive is formatted to suit the size of files your going to be either downloading or seeding you can now either plug it into the router (if only planning to download) or if seeding already completed torrents stored on system, you plug your drive into that system if its not already in there already.
Copy all the completed torrent data from where you saved to a folder on your USB drive. (to make the process less confusing for myself I just called the folder "downloads"
"Seeding and downloading new torrents right to my router filled up my USB device faster than I thought!"
- For those who start with one storage drive who then fill it up and need to replace it with a larger one this can be done by 1st powering of your router and then plugging the full drive into your computer and once you have formatted the "replacement" drive to match the now almost out of space storage drive and copy and paste all folders and files from one drive to the other . (I recommend using TeraCopy if you arn't already as you can recheck to match sure there a 1:1 match.)
- Alternatively you can run cloning software (acronis, EASEUS, ghost ect) however they may be a bit complicated for our newer members.
Setting Up The Router As A Bit Torrent Client:
Step 1 -
First things first we're going to assume your router is all setup and connected to the internet and that you have either customized the settings to your liking or your using it right out of the box.
You'll want to log into your router using the username and password which hopefully is one of the things you did change/update when setting it up for security reasons.
Step 2 -
Once your logged in you'll see what is pictured below:
We now want to click on "USB Applications" in the left side panel as seen pictured below:
You'll see "Download Master" there at the bottom of the list. Click on the "Install" button. It takes several minutes to install. What you are actually installing is the necessary software and folders onto your external hard drive.
Once the install completed you'll want to enter it by clicking the on "Download Master" while in the "USB Applications" page on your router, it'll open up in a new tab (NOTE: if prompted by a username and password screen, it is that of your router which you should know) and you'll then be looking at the following image:
Step 3 -
Once your in the "Download Master" App 'were going to change a few settings to make it possible to see the routers storage drive that we have connected as a visible network share that uses a password to access it. (by default the user name and password are that of your router. That's all you really need but there are options to create your own users with there own special permissions ect for those people who wish to torrent those naughty files and store them.)
Seeing the image displayed above we want to click on "General" under "Settings" in the left panel.
You'll notice "Download to" this is important as if you copied pre downloaded torrents to your drive you'll want the correct file path otherwise you'll download those same torrents all over again.
Click on "Browse located to the right and you'll open up a dialog box with a file tree structure. Click the plus arrow and it'll expand it. First you'll see the name of your usb device and inside that when you expand again you'll see the folder inside it (now if you created a "downloads" folder earlier like I did you'll notice that along with any other folders you created.)
You'll notice that my USB device is named "TeamOS" on it i have three folders and a file. "downloads" is the folder i created and put all my already completed torrents into so that I can seed them from the get go. Another folder is called "Download2" which must have been created when we installed "Download Manager" (we'll just ignore that folder as we have added our own and don't know if deleteing it is safe.) and lastly the file we saw is the App file itself. On my drive you also notice a folder called "My Torrents" this is just something I have added to keep the appropriate .torrent files with their seeding data. You too could do this too if you like.
Once you have selected the folder which the torrents will download to /seed from we can change some settings to make is visible on the network just as if it was another system.
A few options under "Download to" you'll notice the "WAN network" option with a slider next to it; turn it on. If you dont want this feature just leave it disabled.
Lastly we see another slider "Keep seeding after task complete" is already set to "ON" which we want.
If we we're a leech we'd disable that
Now we are all done here so we can click "Apply" at the bottom of the page.
It'll show a percentage dialog to show the settings are applying and then it'll close. You can now click on "Task" at the top in the left panel.
Now before we start adding the torrents we'll quickly click back into the routers window in the other tab and while still in the "USB Applications" menu we'll click on "Media Services & Servers" and when inside you'll notice a tab labelled "Network Place (Samba) Share / Cloud Disk" where going to change a few settings in here relating to be able to see our router storage drive as a network share.
"Enable share" using the slider and then change the "Work Group" to that of your network name that you have set on your computer/s. You can also change your routers device name however I have just left mine at default.
Underneath the "Apply" option you'll see the area we you would add new users that can access the newly created shared USB device located on your router. I have just left it how it is and everything is working fine using the same login and password as i use for my router.
Click on "Apply when finished changing the above mentioned settings. It'll again show a percentage dialog to show the settings are applying and then it'll close. You can now click back into the tab for the "Download Master" App.
Step 4 -
Now we're finally up to adding the torrents. I added all my (currently 16) torrents via the .torrent files i keep stored on my computer. I have also copied those same .torrent files into a folder seen earlier on my USB drive called "My Torrents".
You should still be located on the "Task" windows inside the App.
We want to click on "Add" & then browse to the folder on our computer where we have stored the .torrent files. I always keep mine in a folder inside my "Documents" folder inside a "My Torrents" folder. (For some of you is may be located in "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\uTorrent". You will need to make hidden and system folder visible to get there.) Alternatively you could put the URL or magnet link in but for seeding already completed files I found it easier to just browse for the .torrent I knew i already had.
Once you have found the torrent you need to seed select it and open it and then click apply.
It'll start to download/recheck the already existing files, (if the torrent is large please be patient and just continue to keep adding additional torrents, one by one it'll recheck and seed them providing you have put the pre downloaded files in the downloads directory.) and then you'll notice it is complete and seeding. (If downloading a new torrent you'll notice it downloading for a while depending on the size and available seeds and then it will itself then seed.) Repeat this for all the pre download torrents you copied to the drive and then you'll see a page like this:
Browsing Your Seeds!
This isn't really a step but more of a bonus, if you followed everything mentioned above you'll now be able to visit those shared torrents as they are now a network share.
By browsing to your router using its name (\\DSL-AC68U-67E0)(in my case) or by seeing it in your network places we can now go in using your username and password (default is the same as your routers) and can copy and paste to our local machine any program or iso file we need at any time. You could extract any zip folders to the storage drive but we want to save the space to use for torrents we wish to seed in future.
Below is what my "downloads" directory looks like within my router
I am sure that owners of the any routers capable of this will find this tutorial and the abilities that it will give you to be very useful. I thank those who showed interest in this tutorial and encouraged me to make it and I hope to see posts from people who's router also supports this Bit Torrent feature.
I can confirm that when using the TeamOS .torrents that use the correct tracker you will earn Bonus Points all without killing your power bill in the process!
If I have missed anything please let me know and I hope to write more tutorials in the future if this one is met with positive feedback
Tutorial Revision Version: 1.2
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