this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
56 points (93.8% liked)

Selfhosted

40779 readers
1729 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I would very much like to move from Google and Microsoft and other proprietary, non privacy services.

I have spent hundreds of $ and thousands of hours trying to setup various different services on various different platforms and every single one of them has been difficult, annoying, frustrating, and ultimately fails.

I have concluded I am just not the guy to do this as I am Windows CAD guy and have no idea what I am doing with networking, Linux or CLI. 90% of the words and terms in tutorials are greek to me.

I am looking for notes (Joplin), Google Drive replacement (NextCloud?), and email (??) on a cloud server. And then video streaming (plex or jellyfin + *arr?) and photo management (immich?) on my local machines.

Let me know if you are interested or know of somewhere better to post this.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Unlearned9545 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That is a fair point about needing to have someone troubleshoot for me.

I have been fighting with Plex for 2 years. Tried it on Windows and tried it on TNAS. Despite buying a static IP from my ISP and telling Plex to allow outside connection Plex always said it was unavailable outside my wifi. Most of the time it was anyways, but every once in a while it wouldn't. It would often just a stream in the middle and say the media was no longer available. On LAN and off. Could never link an error log entry with any of these failures. It would often mis identify movies and shows despite me following the naming schema. For example /Media/Movies/Hulk (2008)/Hulk (2008).mkv would often show up as "The Twelve Kingdoms"

I have thousands of discs I am scanning in and after going through 15 tutorials and trial and error I could never get *arrs to work properly. I couldn't get radarr or sonarr to watch folders for ripped movies and move them into the appropriate folder, and tdarr would happily check my files for errors, but refused to convert, compress, or find subtitles for my files. It would just "complete" the task in 1ms and do nothing and report it was done. After trying TDARR on the sixth different computer I almost through it through a window.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There is a LOT to learn to start self-hosting, that's for sure. With most stuff you definitely need at least basic knowledge of how your network functions, ports, NAT, and that kind of stuff.

Plex external access needs a port opened in your router to the plex server, it will try and do that automatically with UPnP but in some cases that's disabled and you need to setup NAT (port forward) manually. Your ISP could also be using CGNAT which means you can't open ports at all, but buying a static IP should make sure that's not the case (although you certainly don't specifically need a static IP for Plex). Often the message in Plex is wrong and will say remote access isn't working when it is in my experience.

Depending on your router/modem there may be some kind of security system running on it and that could be interfering with Plex as well.

Doing some external testing with a port scan on the plex port against your internet IP might help tell you something to figure out what's going on.

The *arrs not moving files or picking up watch folders is usually a permissions issue between the user they are running as, and your file/folder permissions for the source/destination folders. Windows definitely makes this simpler as you don't run into that issue as long as you're using an administrator account that has access to everything.

I've never used tdarr, but wouldn't your DVD rip software already be doing the encode for you anyways? You can also configure your DVD software to name the files and place them in the plex media folder, instead of the extra step of using radarr/sonarr to do it, since those are more for internet download organization.

Plex can also grab subtitles for you, at least that's how I manage mine.