Home media server

I was bored and wanted to created my own personal netflix at home. So, naturally i wanted some kind of hardware that can run a media server Fortunately, I had a spare laptop lying around a toshiba .

specs

Not too shabby if i say so myself.

STEP 0

OS of choice

Nowadays we have gotten a lot of options for installing an operating system that is server ready and usable to the user. meaning i have gottent a lot of options. I have experience running a Arch linux system for the past 2 years and Fedora system for about 6 months. I only ever used a debian based distro when i was dipping my toes into linux and that was about 3.5 years back So, i decided why not try Debian 12 (book work). Everyone priased it as a rock solid distro with amazing performance and stability.

STEP 1

DOWNLOADING OS

I went with the torrent download of the ISO file. Since, it will be faster. I chose the netinstaller cause i couldn’t find the normal one or there wasn’t one idk. Netinstaller worked well in my case as the internet in my home good enough that most the software it needed to download didn’t take long. It may not be suitable for someone living in a slow internet location.

FLASHING OS

You need to flash the usb stick with the os of your choice.

It was fairly straightforward all you ever need to install a linux distro is usb stick that is ideally above 4gb of storage capacity. You can use rufus or media creation tool of your choice.

For Linux users you have a lot of choice you can do something like

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dd if=debian.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M status=progress

i made it up from memory don’t copy paste

or use the cat command or use media creation tool already present in your Operating System if your running a normie distro.

RECOMMENDED

I chose to go with ventoy it is awesome as it allows me to have multiple linux distros in a same usb. It is as simple as setting up ventoy in the usb and then dragging and dropping your ISOs into the Ventoy folder. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED*

Once the usb is flashed properly now we need to boot from it

BOOTING

Booting from the usb is fairly simple. While booting you simply have to hold down the button that makes it go into the UEFI / BIOS menu. It was F2 for me. Once insde the UEFI menu UEFI_MENU go to

In boot menu

• navigate to SECURITY TAB and Disable SECURE BOOT
• Optionally Change Boot order so USB comes first

At this point i had keyboard issues. A lot of keys in the laptop stopped working. So, i had to improvise. Numpad arrow right and Numpad arrow up worked. Left arrow and Down arrow Worked. F2 worked

I had to go to windows and press SHIFT and restart to go into Boot Menu. These workarounds are specific to the laptop i had. Your case may vary.

Select the OS you want to install from USB.

STEP 2

INSTALLING OS

I am gonna skip all the steps here. it is pretty straightforward. The installation wizards will ask you stuff and you have to click a few buttons.

STEP 3

Installing DOCKER

What is docker ?

Docker is a containerization platform unlike virtual machines where all the components of the system are simulated. Here the host kernel is used by the container. Long story short. Virtual machines have performance hit. Docker not so much. Makes it ideal for my old laptop.

The docker website has some good documentations and ways to make docker install very easy. docker-installation easy installation

Remove if installed previous

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for pkg in docker.io docker-doc docker-compose podman-docker containerd runc; do sudo apt-get remove $pkg; done

install fresh

set up apt repo

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# Add Docker's official GPG key:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg
sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/debian/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg

# Add the repository to Apt sources:
echo \
  "deb [arch="$(dpkg --print-architecture)" signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/debian \
  "$(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME")" stable" | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update

install package

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sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin

There are few additional steps you might need to do to make docker run as non root user

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sudo groupadd docker
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

Log out and log back in

Enable auto start up of docker service

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sudo systemctl enable docker.service
sudo systemctl enable containerd.service

Applications that i am currently using

Most the docker images i am using are from linuxserver They have the docker compose for everything. Which makes it very easy for me to copy paste everything

• qBittorrent
• Jellyfin
• Jellyseerr
• prowlarr
• lidarr
• sonarr
• radarr
• heimdall
• ip2cam

qBittorrent

qBittorrent is an open source bittorrent downloader. It allows for webui to manage it. sweet.

setting it up is easy. Go to settings -> enable webui

as you can see from the image below i have added my tailscale ip to the whitelist so i don’t need to authentiate using username and password.

Jellyfin

Media server to serve all the medias you legally own

Jellyfin allows you to serve all the media you legally own. Rip Your own stuff

Jellyfin allows you to have transcoding when possible to allow hardware acceleration go to Settings -> dashboard -> playback -> vaapi

Jellyseerr

Jellyseer allows the users you are serving the jellyfin to request you media they want to see. It is a media requesting thingy. it is quite nice ;) wink wink

prowlarr

Say if you want to download linux isos but there are like 1000 sites. this is where prowlarr comes in. this will help you search through all the sites that provide linux isos.

lidarr

ok enough with the linux isos pun. lidarr helps you with keeping you up with your music needs. It allows you track Artist. It tracks all the albums you already have and any upcoming ones. It will automatically download them and rename them. You goto enable rename files

sonarr

same stuff but for TV Shows. This lets you track all the shows you watch and keep them organised

radarr

To keep track of all your Movies.

heimdall

Having lot of applciations running on your server can quickly become a hassle to keep track of. You gonna need some kind of link list. Why not go for a homepage. It talks with most the popular homelab applications and puts it on the homepage

ip2cam

This is one the few fun things i wanted to do. This basically allows you to stream your webcam.

It’s pretty dark here. but the point is you can stream your webcam through http which is pretty cool. combine it with text to speech program like GNUstep. You can mess around with your family. (They shut down my server (raven) when i messed with them too much… :( )

Final docker compose

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---
version: "3.8"
services:
  heimdall:
    image: linuxserver/heimdall
    container_name: heimdall
    volumes:
      - ~/heimdall/config:/config
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    ports:
      - 80:80
      - 443:443
    restart: unless-stopped

  jellyfin:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/jellyfin:latest
    container_name: jellyfin
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    devices:
      - "/dev/dri/renderD128:/dev/dri/renderD128"
    volumes:
      - ~/jellyfin/config:/config
      - ~/jellyfin/cache:/cache
      - ~/media/tvshows:/data/tvshows
      - ~/media/movies:/data/movies
      - ~/media/music:/data/music
      - ~/media/anime:/data/anime
    ports:
      - 8096:8096
    restart: unless-stopped

  camip:
    image: gen2brain/cam2ip
    container_name: cam2ip
    devices:
      - "/dev/video0:/dev/video0"
    ports:
      - 56000:56000

  qbittorrent:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/qbittorrent:latest
    container_name: qbittorrent
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
      - WEBUI_PORT=8080
    volumes:
      - ~/qbittorrent/config:/config
      - ~/Downloads:/downloads
      - ~/media:/media
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
      - 6881:6881
      - 6881:6881/udp
    restart: unless-stopped

  prowlarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/prowlarr:latest
    container_name: prowlarr
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    volumes:
      - ~/prowlarr/config:/config
    ports:
      - 9696:9696
    restart: unless-stopped

  sonarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/sonarr:latest
    container_name: sonarr
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    volumes:
      - ~/sonarr/config:/config
      - ~/media/tvshows:/tv
      - ~/media/anime:/anime
      - ~/Downloads:/downloads
    ports:
      - 8989:8989
    restart: unless-stopped

  radarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/radarr:latest
    container_name: radarr
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    volumes:
      - ~/radarr/config:/config
      - ~/media/movies:/movies
      - ~/Downloads:/downloads
    ports:
      - 7878:7878
    restart: unless-stopped

  jellyseerr:
    image: fallenbagel/jellyseerr:latest
    container_name: jellyseerr
    environment:
      - LOG_LEVEL=debug
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    ports:
      - 5055:5055
    volumes:
      - ~/jellyseerr/config:/app/config
    restart: unless-stopped

  lidarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:latest
    container_name: lidarr
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Kolkata
    volumes:
      - ~/lidarr/config:/config
      - ~/media/music:/music
      - ~/Downloads:/downloads
    ports:
      - 8686:8686
    restart: unless-stopped

Installing Tailscale

I wanted to access my machine even when i was out of the house. So, you can either use port forwarding to acces it from anywhere which was impossible as my ISP has CGNAT or Double NAT. So, i decided go with Tailscale an atlernative was zerotier. But i didn’t know what the differece was so i went with tailscale. Basically it creates a mesh network where an extra network card showd up in your machince and you can access your remote devices as if they were present in your localmachine

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4: tailscale0: <POINTOPOINT,MULTICAST,NOARP,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1280 qdisc fq_codel state UNKNOWN group default qlen 500
    link/none
    inet 100.117.79.111/32 scope global tailscale0
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fd7a:115c:a1e0:ab12:4843:cd96:6275:4f6f/128 scope global
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::9c38:ed45:1929:4ec/64 scope link stable-privacy
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

It is pretty easy to setup.

SIGN UP TO TAILSCALE

Login in to your tailscale account Or create a new one.

Click on add devices.

Follow the steps. in my case since i am using Debian it was

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curl -fsSL https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/debian/bookworm.noarmor.gpg | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/tailscale-archive-keyring.gpg >/dev/null
curl -fsSL https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/debian/bookworm.tailscale-keyring.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tailscale.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tailscale
sudo tailscale up

Once installing gets completed an url will pop. Navigate to that url and sign in. And you are done

DONE

Now you can access your devices from anywhere. Since, it is a mesh network. There is to data limit. as Data isn’t going through Tailscale servers. They only helping in making the mesh network.

NOTES

TODO

script to make it so i can be reproducible everywhere tailscale funnel to share it with friends