FreeNAS Transmission ⇔ OpenVPN

This guide and the associated scripts will help you secure your Transmission client so it only sends traffic through a VPN. For this particular guide, I'll be showing you how to set up Private Internet Access on a FreeNAS 9.3 jail, but any VPN service should work about the same, and the guide should be generic enough to apply to any FreeBSD jail.

Setup

From the FreeNAS web interface, install the Trasmission plugin.

After Trasmission is installed, log into your FreeNAS machine over SSH. Once inside, run jls to list the jails.

[root@MyNas] /# jls
   JID  IP Address      Hostname                      Path
     2  -               crashplan_1                   /mnt/volume/Plugins/Jails/crashplan_1
     9  -               transmission_3                /mnt/volume/Plugins/Jails/transmission_3
[root@MyNas] /#

To log into your Transmission jail, run jexec (your jail number) tcsh. For example, to get into transmission_3, we'd run:

[root@MyNas] /# jexec 9 tcsh
root@transmission_3:/ #

Now you're inside your jail, running the tcsh shell. cd to the root of the drive, and clone this repo. git doesn't come pre-installed, but svn does, so you can run the following command to checkout the repo using svn:

svn checkout https://github.com/amussey/FreeNAS-Transmission-OpenVPN/trunk /FreeNAS-Transmission-OpenVPN

If you want to install git, you can run the following command:

pkg_add -r git

With the directory cloned, cd into it and run make to begin the setup.

root@transmission_3:/ # cd /FreeNAS-Transmission-OpenVPN
root@transmission_3:/FreeNAS-Transmission-OpenVPN # make

The setup script will walk you through a coupe additional steps.

When you've finished these steps, you'll need to copy your openvpn.conf and the associated keys into /FreeNAS-Transmission-OpenVPN/openvpn. For Private Internet Access, these are available using the following command:

cd openvpn
wget https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/openvpn/openvpn.zip --no-check-certificate
unzip openvpn.zip
mv Sweden.ovpn openvpn.conf  # You can change this to the endpoint of your choice.

With the config file in place, fire up the OpenVPN process with the following line:

/etc/rc.d/transmissionvpn start

To stop the OpenVPN process, you can run the opposite command:

/etc/rc.d/transmissionvpn stop

That's all there is to it! Enjoy your privacy!

FAQ

• How do I test to make sure this is working?

TorGuard provides a .torrent file that will tell you what IP address your application is connecting from. Give it a try, and compare it against your public IP address.

• Will OpenVPN and Transmission automatically start when I boot FreeNAS?

They should! If you find that your instances do not, please create an issue.

• What happens if I lose my VPN connection? Is there any sort of kill switch?

There is! It's a little bit primative, but OpenVPN is launched with the --down flag pointing to a script to kill Transmission. If the VPN connection is lost, OpenVPN should kill the Transmission process.