For logging downloads with rTorrent we used the following script:

#!/bin/bash
dldate=`date '+%A %d %B %H:%M%P'`
echo -ne "$2 completed on $dldate\r\n" >> /home/flx/downloaded.txt
exit 0

The line that did all the work was:

echo -ne "$2 completed on $dldate\r\n" >> /home/flx/downloaded.txt

As mentioned in the earlier post it takes the second argument (the name of the torrent) and writes that to a file. Instead of writing it to a file, we are going to execute prowl.sh and use the torrent name as the argument for the description:

/home/flx/prowl.sh -1 rTorrent “$2 completed on $dldate”

The command creates a low priority notification called “rTorrent” and sends the torrentname and date of completion as description. It should look like this:

Ubuntu_9.10RC.iso completed on Monday 26 October 12:53pm

That’s all! Here is how it looks on Prowl:

It is possible to execute certain actions upon the completion of a torrent, this can be done with the action on_finished. It also allows you to take certain variables from the torrent that has finished and use it in commands. My on finished line looks like this:

system.method.set_key = event.download.finished,writer,”execute=/opt/flx/.rtorrent/writecomplete.sh,$d.get_directory_base=,$d.get_name=”

It executes a bash file (writecomplete.sh) with 2 arguments:

$d.get_directory_base (e.g /home/flx/downloads/apps/Ubuntu_9.10RC.iso)

$d.get_name (Ubuntu_9.10RC.iso)

You can use these arguments to write them to a text file. My bash file (writecomplete.sh) looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
dldate=`date '+%A %d %B %H:%M%P'`
echo -ne "$2 completed on $dldate\r\n" >> /home/flx/downloaded.txt
exit 0

It takes the second argument (the torrent name) and outputs it to a text file with the date. The output looks like this:
Ubuntu_9.10RC.iso completed on Monday 26 October 12:53pm

I personally don’t like to log everything that I download. Lets say I only want to log downloads made to /home/flx/downloads/apps/ but not to any other folder, we can make this conditional by using:

#!/bin/bash
dldate=`date '+%A %d %B %H:%M%P'`
if [ `dirname $1` == "/home/flx/downloads/apps" ] ; then
echo -ne "$2 completed on $dldate\r\n" >> /home/flx/downloaded.txt
fi
exit 0

This script will only log downloads if torrents are downloaded to /home/flx/downloads/apps

Other directories will be ignored.

You can also deliver notifications to your iPhone using rTorrent completed trigger and Prowl4Linux, you can read more on that here:

rTorrent notifications on your iPhone with Prowl

SSH Tunneling is great but it is often forgotten that the tunnel is running on a user with access rights to the server.

To combat this you can create a specific user that can only tunnel over ssh whilst not allowing that user to browse directories, execute stuff, etc.

First of all you will need to create a user using adduser or useradd (depending how retarded your distro is) and securely jail it to a directory. Also make sure that you can log in to this user over ssh. I won’t go through these steps since they can be easily found on the web.

Next, add this to the end of the user profile:
./jail.sh
exit 0

The user profile can be found in its home directory under the name of .profile or .bash_profile. Again, this depends on your distro.

Next create a file called jail.sh in the home directory and use something like this:
#!/bin/sh
echo "SSH Tunnel user, press a key to exit."
read x
exit


Save the file and chmod it:
chmod +x jail.sh

If you now log in to the user via ssh it will keep the session open until a key is pressed. This will allow you to ssh tunnel over that specific account whilst denying any other actions that may harm you if someone gets a hold of that account.

For the actual tunneling itself I recommend using PuTTY or Tunnelier for Windows.
For Linux, just use something along the lines of the following command:
ssh -fqND 8086 sshtunnelusr@my.ip.com -p 4423

8086 is the port of the local SOCKS proxy.
sshtunnelusr is the remote ssh server user.
my.ip.com is the remote ssh server IP.
4423 is the remote ssh server port, default is 22.

Questions? Ask them in the comment section or contact me.