If you’re a savvy, jet-setting mobile computer like I am, you’ve probably run into a situation where you’ve found some awesome new torrent you want to download, but you end up not being on one network connection long enough to actually get anywhere. Or perhaps you’ve found yourself locked behind an un-cool corporate firewall that won’t allow nasty, vile, illegal torrenting. The Azureus team has developed a number of plugins for situations like these that allow you to control a remote client, but they unfortunately require an unhealthy amount of firewall futzing to get to work properly. This HOWTO will walk you through setting up one of these remote controls over Hamachi’s zero-config VPN, then we’ll neatly integrate the applet into Fold.com’s slick Ajax interface.

This setup requires two machines…one “host” box at home running the actual bittorrent client, and one “remote” machine. First off, make sure you’ve got Azureus installed on your host machine, and Hamachi installed on both. This process should be relatively straightforward, but there are plenty of other articles out there about setting these two applications up that you can search for if needed. Two of my favorites are: Install and Configure Azureus and How to set up Hamachi (Win XP).

Next, download the Azureus Swing Web Interface plugin here. Extract the zip file to the host’s Azureus application data directory, the full path should be C:\Documents and Settings\*your user name*\Application Data\Azureus\plugins\webui. In this zip file I’ve included a customized applet_webui_fold.html file to optimize for the Fold container, but feel free to use the full applet_webui.html if you wish.

After copying the files, restart Azureus and the plugin should be activated. Go to Tools > Options > Plugins > Swing Web Interface and set the following options:

One note about the access ip value: set this to your remote Hamachi ip if you want only that one machine to be able to access the applet. If you want anyone on Hamachi to have access, put 5.0.0.0-5.255.255.255 here. If you want anyone in the world to be able to access and therefore take Hamachi out of the equation altogether, type in ALL. Restart Azureus again to apply the new values. To test, type http://*host hamachi ip*:6883 in a browser and you should see an html page to launch the applet. Does it work? Of course it does! Now you’re ready to test the Fold code. Create a new html container and copy in the following code:

Click update, and you should see the following screen (minus torrents in progress):

Tada, that’s it! Enjoy your new stylishly encrypted remote torrenting application. =]

Known issues:

• Remote control will not work over a web proxy.
• May have overlapping issues with other Fold containers with CSS styling.
• Unable to right click to paste torrent URLs in container (unless you feel like signing the applet). Keyboard shortcut CTRL + V works just fine, so I see no reason to go through the trouble.