I’m just curious as I’ve permanently dedicated my laptop to torrenting. I’ve been too nervous to install anything but the VPN and Firefox on it. Now, I’m curious to mess around with Linux some more, which is what I use on it, but I can’t fully test out what all I can do with it without signing into accounts.

Do you use your torrent machine to do other things besides torrenting, signing into personal accounts and stuff?

  • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
    0·
    6 months ago

    not exactly. you use an old machine like that and run it headless… throw a bunch of containers on it…

    get yourself a gluetun and maybe deluge containers… youll have a solid vpn connection, and a torrenting client that wont bleed to public. you can run all kinds of compartmentalized services fairly easily.

  • bionicjoey@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    I don’t have a dedicated torrent machine. I don’t use my phone. Sometimes my gaming PC. Sometimes my TV’s PC.

  • LittleBobbyTables@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Yes, I torrent on the same machine where all my personal stuff is. The biggest reason for this is that I don’t have a dedicated machine to torrent 24/7, though I’d definitely like to set that up at some point. I like being able to seed niche torrents to those who need them, and a machine seeding 24/7 would definitely help with that. Also having easy simple access to the downloaded files is always a plus, but there’s a myriad of ways to do this over a local network (pretty sure some torrenting clients even have an option to torrent over LAN).

    My torrent client is bound to my VPN’s network interface, and my VPN has a killswitch as well, so I’m not paranoid that things will suddenly leak. Been running this setup for months now without issues.

    • ditty@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      I built a NAS and I have the full *arr suite running on it in containers. Usenet and torrent clients organize my media, and since it’s a network share I can access everything from my devices.

  • Nyfure@kbin.social
    0·
    6 months ago

    Not really a problem with putting other stuff on it, apart from adhering to security standards. If you want to separate your personal stuff from hosted stuff, go ahead, but just because its torrent, doesnt make it much different.
    Put it in a VM if you dont have a second machine i guess.

    • jnk@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      Who said anything about torrenting something illegal 👀

      As far as I’m concerned, everything i discuss here is for educational purposes only and even if you share info about “your” setup, it’s just hypothetical. Not your fault if someone you totally don’t know has the same setup you described and uses it for illegal activities.

    • beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      1. “PII” not exactly, more like user-identifiable

      2. I don’t torrent, to be honest I pay for all my media, I just don’t watch very many things

  • nfsm@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Security starts first with you. Most of the attacks are done though social engineering. Email phishing, dodgy webpage logins. Normal password security behaviour should fine for you to use the pc. More importantly, what is the distro you’re using? Maybe consider using Flatpaks for the apps, they tend to offer more restrictions on access to the system. (Installing the torrent app as a Flatpak and only give it permissions to a specific folder) One of things I tend to do is install chromium just to login on my Google apps, Gmail, YT. But I’m more of a non data sharing freak.

  • AnAnonymous@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Currently I’m using a crypto VPS with gluetun for torrenting I swap VPN server every 3 days.

    For security reasons I can’t tell you what’s the country I live in but my VPS it’s hosted in Russia.

  • JCPhoenix@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    I don’t pirate very often anymore, but when I do, I use whatever computer I happen to be on. I just turn on a VPN and bind the torrenting client to the VPN only. This is how I’ve torrented for years, since the late 2000s. I’ve gotten a couple strikes from my ISP several years ago, but that was before I had a commercial VPN. Otherwise, I’ve no issues.

    What are the potential security upsides of doing it on a VM/container or a dedicated machine? I can imagine some performance upsides, but that’s about it.

  • the_third@feddit.deEnglish
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    6 months ago

    I’ve got some vservers and some block storage at hosters in a different country and I terminate a VPN tunnel there from yet another country. Storage is LUKS encrypted and VMs are configured to halt hard automatically in case of certain triggers that hint towards hypervisor side fuckery.

    It’s not bullet proof, but it’s fire and forget, basically seed boxes where I’ve split knowledge further.

    I used this as an exercise in provider agnostic deployment and I’m mainly hosting archive.org torrents that can use some seeding there.

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Depends on the devices I have on hand. Both my laptop and have my VPN, so I am able to get my LibreOffice windows downloads and ahem other things that I am not gonna talk about.

  • realitista@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    I have a VM running as a seedbox with full time VPN on my synology NAS. I use that synology for lots of other stuff.