one of my biggest pet peeves about the DNS-323 hacks is that there doesn’t appear to be any easy way to automate the download of torrents to the mldonkey client. mldonkey works great once you get the torrent file to it, but getting the torrent file to it can be a bit tricky.

sure there’s a web interface to do it, or you can sancho in, but i have grown accustomed to utorrent’s automatic RSS parsing features. what made utorrent’s RSS feed especially cool was that you can tag a show to be downloaded and once the file was downloaded, it won’t try to download the show again, even if you delete the file while the torrent is still in the RSS feed.

mldonkey doesn’t have any out-of-the-box features to do this and adding a torrent to mldonkey from the command-line is harder than you would expect. maybe i haven’t found the command-line way to do it, but i haven’t been able to find it yet.

anyway, i have finally decided to install PHP on the NAS box. this gives me a whole slew of new options. a little scripting magic later (i wish that the version of PHP i got had curl support) , i made an RSS parser, torrent downloader, and telnet client to access mlnet’s admin telnet command line program. all in all, the script seems to be working well after cron’ing it, so i’ve got the same functionality that i had before. yay. now it’s just time to make a list of all the things to download…