At least in arch, the package qbittorrent-nox
now contains the ability to connect to i2p. For people starting out, using i2p you wouldn’t need to use a VPN to download your favorite “linux ISOs”; just use i2p and have a fully automated Jellyfin server!
I recommend using i2pd as the i2p router
It’s all free and open source! If you’re on windows it might be a little more difficult so at least having a linux PC you can reliably have on 24/7 would make things easier. I personally use arch (I’ve tried this on my endeavour OS), very easy installation for beginners) for this since it’s rolling release (latest versions of packages!) and the AUR is a godsend. The programs themselves take little ram and cpu, with qbittorrent probably needing the most ram once you have more torrents downloaded (I’m running this on 4 cores of CPU and 4 gigs of ram alongside my minecraft server, a tor relay and a monero node. any old laptop repurposed with endeavour should do the trick)
the steps I took to do this (on endeavour os) was:
install i2pd
sudo pacman -S i2pd
Install qbittorrent webui
sudo pacman -S qbittorrent-nox
install prowlarr (optionally sonarr and radarr, which will automatically manage video files for you. Plays reaaaally well with Jellyfin, so you wouldn’t have weirdly formatted files that is being read by Jellyfin)
yay -S prowlarr
yay -S sonarr
yay -S radarr
Lastly you have to turn enable the *arrs in systemd
sudo systemctl enable --now prowlarr
(or you can also go the docker route with qbittorrent, prowlarr, sonarr and radarr, if you don’t have arch. This is the more universal route and can handle many more devices. Although I have not checked if
qbittorrent-docker
has i2p integration yet. For that you may need to swap out qbittorrent for vuze, or apply the patch in the comment in the link i posted in the docker container [which is editing theqBittorrent.conf
file])For the average joe i’d say it’ll be an afternoon’s worth of labor to set up, and the upside is not relying on a VPN to install content and a fully automated Jellyfin server! Plus you get to help the steadily-growing i2p network If you have more questions I’d be happy to answer here :)
Thanks for the write up. We need such a write up as a top level post if you’re down for it.
I use docker and prefer docker over a package.
I’d love to jump on the bandwagon but until now I thought it’s still years away.
Do you know if this is the right docker image? https://geti2p.net/de/download/docker
Are there other trackers than postman? For e.g. German/French content?
How to connect qbittorrent and i2p in docker?
Are there already private trackers as well? I prefer private ones.
I haven’t tried the i2p docker image, but it shouldd work. Let me know
There are some German and French content that I see occasionally in Postman. In the actual i2p postman site you can filter for the French and German language.
If you’re using the docker image the
network_mode
is set tohost
, so it should work the same as if i2p was installed without containerization.where
7656
is the SAM bridge port. I’m using version 4.6.3 of qbittorrent and it has this feature. The arch package for qbittorrent-nox (the webui edition of qbittorrent) already has this feature. I just checked; the latest docker image for qbittorrent should already have this feature! https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-qbittorrentNot too sure about private trackers. Although, due to the fundamental anonymizing feature of i2p there would be no way for copyright trolls to track IP addresses and send mass lawsuits, which private trackers defend against.
Private trackers are not only protecting you. It also protects against full time leachers. And people keep up the quality of the seeds. Bad torrents die quickly.
So how does one actually use I2P?
if you install java i2p it should come with the browser and torrent client (i2psnark) pre-packaged
for i2pd (c++ implenetation) you have to configure firefox (i use librewolf with noscript) to use the http proxy (on port 4444).