In their comments to a recent post that I made, asking people to share their torrenting ratios, some folks were talking about how they have setup media servers for their parents. This sounded really cool and I would like to do the same thing for my family.
I simply mount my torrenting drives with sshfs and consume media with mpv, because I don’t need anything else. But for my technologically less inclined family members, I guess setting up something with a GUI would be kind and nice.
I am torrenting on a VPN router, behind which there is a switch that only switches a specific port - which I rotate regularly for safety - to a public facing router, so that I can ssh into my home network.
Questions:
- I have no experience with or knowledge of these to me fancy sounding GUI projects. For instance, do my family members create accounts that I then approve? Do I need to install and setup something on their endpoints (for instance, to configure which port to use, etc.) or is it simple enough for the layperson to do this themselves?
- Will the fancy stuff accept and be accessible with port forwarding from my public facing router to my VPN router and then into my torrenting rig just like my ssh server does or am I going to have to set this up directly connected to the public facing router?
Please give me your most straightforward recommendations! 🥰
I use proxmox, all the *arrs are in one docker host running as an LXC. So the stack is: Proxmox> LXC> Docker Compose> Gluetun> *arrs.
I run it this way because ease of set up, as a normie Nix scares me in ways YAML doesn’t. It’s one big compose file, everything talks to each other using the virtual docker network. Update is one button. It just works™.
I have an Lxc running jellyfin as a front end, an Audiobookshelf Lxc, one running Seerr. A bunch of other front end service lxcs (Immich, Homarr, what have you). All the front ends have Tailscale installed for remote access.
Family and friends have a pi acting as an access point to Tailscale. Then it’s the nginx, pihole combo for nice URLs and HTTPS. Nothing is on the open web, it’s all behind tailscale.
I started on just a pi running docker running everything for my fiancée and I, then it just kinda grew. I originally just wanted to block ads.
Trash-guides is your friend for *arr set up. Dockstarter is your friend for basic installation of *arrs. Thousands of guides on YouTube to get you started.
Are you just using Proxmox for LXCs? In that case why use Proxmox + LXCs + Docker, instead of say, bare metal Debian + Docker, without the extra LXC middle layer?
Solid question. Mostly curiosity, education, love of the game. I started with raspian + docker, and wanted to see if the grass was greener. I could probably achieve everything I’m doing now on Debian + Docker. If I tore it all down, I’d probably go back to Debian + Docker managed with Dockge (probably) just for the simplicity.
Automagic snapshots though, I still haven’t learned to take a back up before tinkering, I probably never will. So lxcs are set to snap shot at appropriate intervals, so if I try change a thing, fuck it up, it’s incredibly convenient for me to roll it back and try again. A solveable problem in Debian, I’m sure, but I like how Docker does it. Native WebUI is nice. I like how Proxmox handles file permissions, it’s running my raid and I just bind mount the zpool.
Dunno, my stuff works, I’m comfortable with it. There’s more for me to learn yet. But if I were of a learning mood, I’d probably experiment with Nix.
Fair enough, reason I ask is that I also use Proxmox, though I separate things into VMs instead of LXCs. Mainly for security, but also for things like a gaming VM. But it’s always interesting to hear how other people set things up.