Do you use the device you torrent on for personal things as well?

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?

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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.
- 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.

I used to torrent on my work machine too lmao

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.

Yes let me post PII about my device setup I use for illegal activities to a PUBLIC FORUM
- 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.
- “PII” not exactly, more like user-identifiable
  I don’t torrent, to be honest I pay for all my media, I just don’t watch very many things

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.

This is like asking “do you own a second computer?”

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.

I have a dedicated machine that torrents and seeds 24/7 but for some random thing I use my main pc

Technically yes. I have all my piracy stuff running in a VM on my desktop.

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

I use a wyse terminal as a torrent downloader and samba server. I stored documents, including my CV on there until recently but started thinking that might be a bad idea. So now I sync those documents between my devices using Syncthing and will soon be installing Jellyfin on that wyse terminal.
- you recommend wyse? any negative experiences with it?

I got a used mini pc to run as a media center, running the arr stack and torrent client that's bound to the VPN interface. For usenet stuff I don't care is it on VPN or not. Its running headless.
If you make sure that the torrent client is set to be bound on the VPN interface, you are fine, if VPN is not up, it should not start, since the interface is not up. For VPN I use wireguard and set the VPN to be brought up by via wg-quick command and use systemd to start it during boot.
You'll be fine using it for personal stuff along with pulling stuff from high seas.
- I am new to selfhosting stuff and the arr stack confuses the shit out of me. I've got a Proxmox cluster running services with LXCs and VMs and while I am savvy enough, the issue for me is mounting external storage to download my media from the arr stack to as I'm using 4 NUCs with anywhere from 256-512GB of storage. I am currently checking out Trash Guides.

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.

Yep, since I mostly pirate obscure games I don't need to worry about the VPN. Lutris works great for fitgirl-repacks

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.

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.

if you use a dedicated device for torrents its more because its faster if you try to also open a browser when torrenting big files and its using all your bandwidth it just makes everything slower.if you seed and download a lot that can slow down everything else you do on that device.

I use an optiplex for torrenting, Plex media server, and real debrid. The VPN is always on so I wouldn't be concerned to use it as my daily driver but it's a bit old to handle other tasks in use my daily driver for.

We have a torrent client set up on our nas. We use truenas.

How about installing RustDesk server con the laptop? Have you heard about Docker and self-hosting? That's a fun rollercoaster surrounded by rabbit holes ;P GL, HF.

Device? All instances of torrent clients I use run in Kubernetes pods. I then access my Linux ISOs over NFS shares hooked up as PersistentVolume mounts

Yeah, although, now that you bring it up, I might want to put it in a vm.

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.
- This guy spies.
  
  LMAO I'm not from Russia, I just host the VPS there, less risk of getting caught for piracy..

I have a dedicated computer for torrents and I don't sign into any accounts with it, I also block torrents on my router and bind my client to my VPN seems to work out okay

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