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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • For internet access Plex is by far the easiest. You can use Jellyfin but it can be a lot more effort and can be brittle. Tailscale might be a solution but if you want to share with friends it would mean giving them access to your Tailscale network. Then you’ve got reverse proxies like Nginx Reverse Proxy. This would require buying a domain and configuring something like Cloudflare too, plus port forwarding on your router. Tailscale offers a publically accessible domain now which is similar but you cannot configure the TLD. Still, you’re opening an internet accessible port for a FOSS application and this is far less secure unless you know what you’re doing.


  • I think this is the last hurdle with the arr setup: discoverability. Plex has tried to jam in something, but it’s far from good. They’re never going to produce a pirate watchlist, so it would have to fall to Jellyfin. What people are seeking is the Netflix experience of “curated” content, spoonfed, and instantly watchable.

    For the record I do the same as you. I think the intentionality is a healthy barrier to mindless browsing and consumption, but once people are hooked, it’s hard to wean them off.


  • Spoiler: I am deeply into the arr “ecosystem” and love the shit out of it.

    I think I finally understand Linux fans. Yes it’s confusing for new people, but because I’m so into the weeds on this stuff I love how much choice I have. And if one of the projects doesn’t have what we want, someone makes a fork.

    To point: you really only need Sonarr and Radarr. Get those set up and working how you like. I recommend the Trash Guides. Once that’s working how you like, get Prowlarr for easy management of your usenet and torrent indexers. Most people should stop there.



  • I would build a cheap PC based on a G series Intel CPU. The G7400 is cheap and will handle anything you want to transcode, plus won’t get bottlenecked with IO and other processes you might want to run later like the Arr stack. You probably don’t need more than 8GB of RAM. This will give you lots of flexibility to choose the right OS which suits you, which software you want, upgrades, and especially HDDs down the road (if you get a case with HDD slots). I started small and ended up with 15 disks over the years.

    Unraid ($250) is one option but it’s expensive and buggy. TrueNAS is a very popular ZFS based solution which is free. Windows is also a surprisingly good option. It’s your lowest effort option by far. You can replicate Unraid functionality with SnapRAID and DrivePool ($50).


  • ChatGPT can be surprisingly useful when tackling the endless bugs and weird and unexpected differences on each Linux distro. I think you’re missing out. It shaves off 30-40% of the time it takes me to arrive at the right solution. It’s obviously not omniscient, but it provides a lot of ideas which I had not considered. Usually one of those paths works.





  • FYI you can definitely watch while your network is offline. You just net to tell it that you’re happy with that (it’s not activated by default for security reasons).

    • In your Plex server settings, go to Network, enable “Show Advanced”.

    • Near the bottom, find the textbox that says List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth

    • In this field, enter the local IP address of any Plex client(s) you want to keep using if your internet (or the Plex cloud) is down.

    • A example: 192.168.0.50

    • Save the setting, done.

    #Important thing to be aware of:

    What this setting does is tell your local Plex server to simply give any Plex client that connects from that specific IP full admin access to your Plex server, ignoring any account restrictions. This means that if you have things in place to restrict access to some libraries (kids blocked from 18+ movies etc) those restrictions will have no effect. Also if you have the option set to allow file deletion, then any client from that IP could also delete items. And they could of course change any settings in your Plex server. So your kids can watch anything on your server, if you have a guest in your network and they browse to the Plex web interface, they can mess with things.

    Because of that I would recommend to limit the amount of IP’s you enter in that field to the absolute bare minimum. For example, only whitelist the “main living room device” plus one device you to admin the server, such as a laptop.

    If you want to whitelist multiple devices, this is a example:

    192.168.0.50,192.168.0.77,192.168.0.80
    

    If you want to whitelist a entire network, these would be examples:

    192.168.0.0/24 (this means 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.0.255)
    
    192.168.0.0/16 (this means 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255)
    

    And of course those involved network devices should use static IPs in your home network.