As an aside : Protosd, can I kindly suggest you put in some amendment to your video about this? Maybe a bit of text or something? I mean - and CERTAINLY not to blame you or anything - but I, being rather ignorant, did not know I had to manually put in a name server after setting my network interface up as static, and I suspect that other n00bies like me might be in the same boat. Again, not to say that what you did wasn't helpful - to the contrary. But I strongly suspect that a lot of the hunting around on my part since then (both about torrents, and e-mail) was due to just that.
Thanks for the suggestion SilverJS, I'd be happy to do that. I'm just waking up and trying to catch up, but later today I'll try to work on that and post another link here for the people that haven't seen it yet.
(Suppose one, as I now understand it to be proper, made his interface static, and also put in a name server, and then proceeded to install the jail and plugins, and restarted. Would the jail automatically pick up the DNS then?)
Yes, that should work, or like I think William said, if you forget to enter the Nameserver, after you enter it just stop and start the Plugin jail and it should refresh.
A separate question : I had to manually start the Transmission service after I rebooted. Is this normal?
No, it should start automatically, but it could be a bug.