April 09, 2009 by sharky
Looking to get a seedbox for free? Well, we can’t exactly promise you that - but unique to SeedboxHosting.com is the ability to add new users (create TorrentFlux sub-account slices) to help split up the original cost. All new users created by you will receive their own specific login details, including an FTP account. More importantly, you’ll also be able to set up customized disk quotas for your new users, and limit each one to certain resources on the server. SeedboxHosting’s new Leaseweb Pro dedicated seedbox server comes with a generous 1 TB hard drive & 1 GB memory; making it ideal for multiple users. For example, you could create 4 sub-accounts and give each of them access to 200 GB of storage, and still keep a slice for yourself. Want to limit the number of active torrents for each? You can do that (and should) as well. So, what are you waiting for? Let’s get started!
Reselling Scenarios: Make profit, and keep a seedbox
Obviously before you even begin - you’re going to need to pick up one of their dedicated LeaseWeb Pro seedboxes. The cost is €97 (Euro) a month (that’s about $127 USD). Here are a few scenarios of how it can be resold into slices, perhaps turning a small profit on the side:
- — 3 users, each pay $50/mo, and receive 300 GB storage. You’ll get a tiny slice of ~30 GB storage for yourself, and profit $23/mo.
- — 4 users, each pay $30/mo, and receive 200 GB storage. You’ll be left with ~130 GB for yourself.
- — 5 users, each pay $25/mo, and receive 150 GB storage. You’ll get ~180 GB for yourself (but only break even).
- — 6 users, each pay $25/mo, and receive 140 GB storage. You’ll get a ~90 GB slice, and make ~$23/mo. profit.
SeedboxHosting.com is the only seedbox provider that allows clients to create sub-accounts while incorporating disk quotas and automatic FTP account creation.
This can be taken a step further, as quotas are fully customizable for each user. Be creative (the # of active torrents can also be configured into pricing):
- — 2 users, each pay $50 and receive 250 GB slices; 2 other users pay $30 and receive 150 GBs - you’re left with ~30 GB for yourself and make ~$33/mo.
- — 3 users, each pay $30 for 150 GB and 10 active torrents; 3 other users pay $25 for 125 GB and 7 active torrents - you profit ~$38/mo and receive a slice of ~100 GB storage.
Part I - Setting up the ‘Quota Tools’ on your seedbox:
In reality, just about anyone can purchase a server and install TorrentFlux-b4rt onto it, and then create new users. This is not new or exclusive to SeedboxHosting. However, setting up individual disk quotas for your users is mandatory and does not come pre-installed with TFlux.
If you do not set up disk quotas, all users will have access to the entire drivespace of the server, with the ability to run an unlimited number of torrents. This is not desirable, for reasons obvious.
That’s where SeedboxHosting comes in. They incorporate a customized Quota Tools feature can be used to patch the TorrentFlux installation, which allows for limiting drive space and active torrents for each user on the box. Presently it’s only available for their LeaseWeb Pro servers, but may expand to others. To enable the Quota Tools, you’ll need to follow these simple steps:
1. Log into your SeedboxHosting account in the “Control Panel”, where you’ll notice your server listed. Click on the button (as shown below) that says “add_quota_tools“.
2. You’ll be prompted to confirm the changes - click “OK” to finalize:
3. Next, you’ll notice a new announcement, with a special link that you’ll need to click in order to activate the Quota Tools:
4. Now, click the link that says “Start instalation“:
5. If all goes as planned with the patch being successful, a message will be displayed as shown below. Click The “Home” button to go to your TFlux index page.
6. In your “admin” menu at the top right corner, you’ll now notice a new “quota” tab - click it.
That’s it! The next section explains how to apply your disk quotas.
Setting up Disk Quotas for your users:
Be default, the disk quotas are set to “1″ or enabled. However, the actual settings are set to “0″ (disabled) for each parameter, which means that your users will have both unlimited torrents and unlimited storage - so you’ll need to edit the settings. The image below explains these limits:
The first section above in “General Options” are global settings used for all new sub-accounts that you create. When you create a new user in TFlux, they’ll be added to this list and will automatically use the settings you supplied in the “General” area. Note: You can always come back and edit/change the settings for individual users. Be certain to click the Save settings button after making any modifications.
For the example settings used above, I limited the accounts to 5 active torrents (Count Limit = 5), and 1 GB of storage space on the server (Soft Limit = 1000). If a user tries to start a torrent that is larger than 1 GB (or exceed the 1 GB total for all torrents) they will see this error message below. Additionally, a similar error message will be displayed if a user tries to start a 6th active torrent.
Customizing individual sub-accounts: Next to each user name, you’re also able to customize the quotas for each specific user. An example of this is limiting a particular user to 100 GB and 10 active torrents, and another user to 200 GB and 15 active torrents. (see below)
Part II - Create a New User
Note — While there is no hard limit to how many sub-accounts you can create, it’s recommended that you don’t add more than 4 or 5 users, since server resources will be spread out too thinly if you go any higher than this (however, this is up to you). Equally important is setting a reasonable amount of active torrents for each user (see above). Have you ever tried a cheap shared seedbox that seems too good to be true, only to find that the speeds were horrible and the server unresponsive? Likely what’s happened is the owner put 10 or more users on the same machine, bogging down the server and hampering speeds for everyone on it. Welcome to an oversold server, a very common problem in the seedbox community.
Adding new users in TorrentFlux-b4rt:
Creating new users is easily done right through the TorrentFlux admin page. Login to your seedbox through TorrentFlux, and click the “Admin” heading in the top right corner of the window. Then, click on the “users” tab.
Next, click the “create user” link:
For the attributes of the new user, enter a desired user name and be sure to add a password (twice). Remember these, since you’ll be giving out these two login details to your “customer”, along with the URL to the seedbox (it’s the same URL as the main box). Also, be sure to create the user as a Normal User (not admin). Click Create to finish.
The new user (NewUser1) is now added to your seedbox. Since you’re the super administrator of the seedbox, any torrents that are added by your users will also appear on your main TorrentFlux page. Also be advised that the username is not case-sensitive, so NewUser1 can also log in as “newuser1″.
On your TFlux index page, you’ll be viewing all of the torrents from all users at the same time. These are not separated (grouped) into who has what. However, “your” torrents are listed at the top, and all other torrents are grouped together below like this:
This also means you have total control over all the torrents. Use this power wisely. “With great seedbox power comes great seedbox responsibility.”
FTP Accounts:
By default, SeedboxHosting has enabled a nifty custom script that automatically creates a new FTP account for each added user on the seedbox. Each user can then access their specific download folder through FTP. It’s worth noting that an FTP account is only created after a new user has added a torrent to their seedbox.
The login details for the FTP account are identical to the one used to login to TorrentFlux. Whatever username & password you created (for each sub-account) are also used to log into their FTP account. Additionally, the FTP address (URL) is exactly the same for all users, which is also the same for you, the “admin” - whatever FTP address is yours, is also theirs. The discerning difference here is that your sub-account users are only able to browse their own folders in FTP (not anyone else’s).
To find the URL of your FTP account, check the ‘welcome email’ message that arrived when you first purchased the seedbox. Or, check your accounts (control panel) area, and look for FTP. NOTE: Remove the “admin@” from the URL to get the actual FTP address. In the example below, the FTP address is actually ftp://guarana.s33db0x.com - this is what you want to be sending your “customers”, along with the login details (the username/password combo).
Messaging Your ‘Customers’ via TorrentFlux
As the admin, you’re able to send messages (PMs) to your sub-account users, in the event that you need to announce something important. To do this, click the “Messages” menu item, and from the dropdown list, select a user - and click Compose.
(Additionally, if you have not disabled “show user list” in the settings - see the notes at the bottom of the tutorial), you’ll be able to click on a username and directly send a message this way:
Type your message, and click Send. You can send the same message to all users by putting a checkmark where it says “Send to All Users”.
The normal method of sending messages will appear as a flashing “Messages” tab for users you sent the message to.
Also, you can force your users to acknowledge and read the message, if you prefer. By checkmarking the "Force User(s) to Read" box, they’ll see this before being able to do anything with the seedbox:
Other Options:
Most of the settings in the admin area are pre-configured correctly, so your seedbox will work ’straight out of the box’. However, there are a few key areas in which settings can be changed or configured to your liking.
- Index — In the “admin” area, you can customize the look and feel of TorrentFlux-b4rt. Click on the index tab, where you’ll be able to manage the display (and other settings) for the TFlux index page.
- Superadmin — Use this tab to perform a variety of maintenance work, and other features related to the seedbox. Do so at your own risk!
- Server — The location of all the paths for working programs in TFlux.
- Stats — You can turn off the setting for “Publicly Visible Stats” if desired. If enabled, superadmin level stats (server load, all transfer details, etc) are visible to the public.
- Fluxd — By default, Fluxd is turned off - but needs to be enabled to perform certain functions, such as setting up Watch ‘jobs’, and RSSad - RSS direct download torrent feeds.
- Users — Some settings can be customized per-user, such as “Hide Offline Users on Home Page”.
- Links — Add your own custom links to the TFlux index page.
- Activity — By default, this displays the last 50 activities that occured through TFlux.
- RSS — Setting up “Direct Download” RSS feeds.
- Search — Disabled by default (which is a good thing).
- XFer — You can customize periodic (weekly, monthly) bandwidth limits, if desired. Here it’s also possible to enable/disable display of public xfer stats - when enabled, data transfer statistics will be visible for all users.
- Dir — A ton of settings here; such as read/write access, default archive (ZIP or TAR), VLC player setup.
- Webapp — Styling, themes, login type & RSS settings.
- Control — Here you can enable/disable the ability to change BT clients & customize transfers.
- Transfer — Very important, although it comes preconfigured well. Can change default BT client (and the settings for Transmission), enable NZBPerl and WGet, etc.
Important TorrentFlux-b4rt Setup Notes & Tips:
Disable ‘Public Read’ and ‘Public Write’:
Very Important: Depending on how TorrentFlux-b4rt was originally configured & installed, it’s possible that your sub-account users have read access and/or write access to every other users’ download folders in the “Directory” menu. In short, this means that everyone can see what everyone else has downloaded (and even the ability to download from these directories themselves). This is not good - you really need to make sure this is turned off in the settings. To do this, go to Admin, and click the dir tab. In the first two options, set both “Public Read” and “Public Write” to False, and scroll all the way to the bottom and click Update Settings.
Removing ‘User List’ from TorrentFlux index page:
By default, all sub-account users are listed on the main index page, which are also visible by everyone else. This may not be particularly desirable, since it’s an automatic giveaway to how many users you’ve got running on the server:
If you do not wish to display an open list of all users on the server (recommended), you’ll need to turn this off in the settings. To do so, go into Admin, then click the index tab, and scroll down to where it says, “Display Users List:” and set this to False, and save the changes by clicking “Update Settings” in the bottom of the window.
‘Same Torrent’ Errors:
No two users can upload and start exactly the same .torrent filename (since all torrents from all users are kept in the same folder on the server). Here’s an example of the error message that will occur when trying to start a duplicate torrent:
The workaround for this is to manually edit the name of the torrent file before uploading it. The torrent will still connect to the tracker, and you’ll still receive the proper stats for it on your private tracker account. Thus, the file name of the torrent is arbitrary.
Troubleshooting Your SeedboxHosting Server:
It’s always a good idea to keep an instance of your seedbox running in a browser tab (while logged in as "admin"), in the event that it runs into any problems. We also recommend that you turn on the Page Refresh feature in the TFlux index page, in order to get "live" results of the box in action. Normally, it’s not uncommon that TFlux boxes will ‘crash’ or timeout in a web browser, and usually this can be resolved by reloading the browser page. If this doesn’t work, just as with any server, it may be occasionally required to manually reboot the server in order to reset it.
For SeedboxHosting.com customers, this can be done from your Control Panel in the accounts area. Where you see your seedbox listed, click either the reboot or force_reboot button.
You’ll be prompted to confirm the change, select OK.
A new message will be displayed - "Server is being rebooted and will be available in a few minutes". Thus, wait a few minutes and then attempt to refresh the seedbox in the browser - this usually clears things up.
Account Info For Your Clients
A recap: When signing up for an account with you, your customers will require some important information about the new account & seedbox, such as:
- • A friendly welcome message, with your contact info included.
- • Package details (price, storage space and torrent limit) for chosen account.
- • HTTP Seedbox URL & login details (username/password).
- • FTP address for the seedbox, with login details (same as above).
Be sure to get yourself a PayPal account - most purchasers will request this method of payment.
Archived by FSFmirror
