Howto: install mldonkey on FreeNAS 8.0

FreeNAS 8.0 has been released a while ago, but it’s still lacking many features that nowadays are fundamental to any NAS (most of which will be fixed in 8.1). In particular it lacks any form of torrent manager, so I decided to install MLDonkey on my box and write a small HowTo about it.

Requirements:

• A computer running FreeNAS 8.0
• SSH access to said computer and root privileges
• A volume with a few megabytes free to download the packages
• A working internet connection

How does this work?

When installing FreeNAS 8.0 on a USB drive (at least when using dd to write the disk image), the UFS image used to mount the root partition has about 22 MiB free. Since MLDonkey (without GUI, made exception for the integrated web-server) and its dependencies require roughly 11 MiBs, there is more than enough space to install it.

Howto:

1. Login in your FreeNAS box as root (the password is the same that you set for the admin user)
2. Change directory to the one that will contain the downloaded files

   cd /path/to/directory/

3. Download this script (code shown below) by running

   fetch http://nexus.thenexus.it/install_mldonkey_freenas8.sh

   Please note that the script has been written by a lazy-bum (myself) and there is no error checking! Any improvements to the script are welcome.

4. Execute the script you just downloaded by running

   sh install_mldonkey_freenas8.sh

5. MLDonkey is now installed, you can launch it by typing mlnet, further information and guides vailable at

Note:

At the time of writing the available packages were the following:

• net-p2p/mldonkey-core-3.0.6
• graphics/jpeg-8_3
• graphics/gd-2.0.35_7,1

You might need to change the file names appearing in the howto according to new releases.

The script’s code

#!/bin/bash

ARCH=`uname -m`
MACHINE=`uname  -r | cut -d- -f1-2 | awk '{print tolower($0)}'`
SERVER=ftp://ftp.freebsd.org
ROOTDIR=/pub/FreeBSD/ports

fetch ${SERVER}${ROOTDIR}/${ARCH}/packages-${MACHINE}/graphics/jpeg-8_3.tbz
fetch ${SERVER}${ROOTDIR}/${ARCH}/packages-${MACHINE}/graphics/gd-2.0.35_7,1.tbz
fetch ${SERVER}${ROOTDIR}/${ARCH}/packages-${MACHINE}/net-p2p/mldonkey-core-3.0.6.tbz

mount -o rw -t ufs /dev/ufs/FreeNASs1a /
pkg_add jpeg-8_3.tbz gd-2.0.35_7,1.tbz mldonkey-core-3.0.6.tbz
mount -o ro -t ufs /dev/ufs/FreeNASs1a /