You absolutely need some sort of anonymizing proxy or VPN system in place in order to use BitTorrent safely. In addition, if you’re not overly familiar with the ins and outs of setting up a BitTorrent client for anonymous downloading, you should read up on it.
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the second tutorial is optional (but remote access is incredibly handy to have for this project, as a download box is a perfect candidate for a headless build), and the most important part of the third tutorial is simply setting up the hard drive and configuring it to auto-mount on boot (as described in the third guide).
Manual configuration also means that tweaking the settings will be a difficult job.
There’s no point in learning the configuration process and manually entering the VPN numbers in the settings when you can simply install an app.