Installing Transmission with OpenVPN

Now we’re going to setup a bittorrent client as well as an OpenVPN client to keep our traffic secure. This is another straightforward docker-compose modification.

Get an OpenVPN Provider

You’ll need a VPN provider. I highly recommend private internet access because I’ve been using them for years. They have good servers that are fast and they keep your information private. Additionally, the image we’re going to use works extremely well with PIA and does some really useful things like automatically configuring port forwarding.

I do use affiliate marketing to help pay for keeping the site up. I am not currently using ad based revenue generation and I only market the services I actually use. If you sign up for PIA using the link above, I do get minor compensation which helps me out and I appreciate your patronage.

Update Docker-Compose

The project page is located here. Additional documentation is located here.

SSH into your NAS and open docker-compose.yml for editing. Add these lines:

  transmission-openvpn:
    container_name: transmission
    image: haugene/transmission-openvpn
    cap_add:
      - NET_ADMIN
    volumes:
      - '/volume1/docker/transmission:/data'
      - '/volume1/video/transmission/complete:/complete'
      - '/volume1/video/transmission/incomplete:/incomplete'
    environment:
      - OPENVPN_PROVIDER=PIA
      - OPENVPN_CONFIG=ca_vancouver
      - OPENVPN_USERNAME=pxxxxxxx
      - OPENVPN_PASSWORD=XXXXXXXX
      - LOCAL_NETWORK=192.168.1.0/24
      - TRANSMISSION_INCOMPLETE_DIR=/incomplete
      - TRANSMISSION_DOWNLOAD_DIR=/complete
      - TRANSMISSION_INCOMPLETE_DIR_ENABLED=true
    logging:
      driver: json-file
      options:
        max-size: 10m
    ports:
      - '32080:9091'
    restart: unless-stopped

We want all data related to torrents to be written to the real filesystem which is why I’m including the complete and incomplete environment configuration. I also have to mount those internal directories to the corresponding directories on the NAS which is the additional volume configuration.

Make sure that you replace the OPENVPN environment fields with your correct values. It appears that they cannot go into the .env file, they must to into the docker-compose file to work correctly.

You should also make a file in /volume1/docker/transmission/resolv.conf which will contain the PIA DNS server entries so that you don’t leak your DNS requests out of the VPN.

nameserver 209.222.18.222
nameserver 209.222.18.218

You also need to make a tunnel adapter for synology. Pete’s tech blog has a good section on how to create the script and make sure that it gets run if your synology reboots.

Now stop docker compose and restart with the new configuration

sudo docker-compose down
sudo docker-compose up -d

Testing

You should be able to see the transmission screen at http://${your nas ip}:32080

Lets confirm that the VPN is working correctly. Go to this page. Download the test torrent file and upload it into transmission. Click on the folder. Click the Choose Files button and then select the file that you just downloaded and hit upload. When you go back to the checkmyip.torrentprivacy.com site you should see that the IP in Torrent IP is different.

Now lets confirm that torrents download correctly. Find a torrent via your favorite indexer and load it into transmission the same way we just did for the privacy tracker. Confirm that it shows up in incomplete directory until it completes and then shows up in the completed folder on the NAS.