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! 🥰

  • Kaul@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    9·
    1 day ago

    I actually just made a little diagram for myself to help with troubleshooting. Hopefully it’s helpful for others wanting to automate their movie/show accumulation. I made it a little simpler than the original by taking out the music part of it (lmk if I should share the full thing).

    For context, the green boxes are the main server, the grey boxes are running on a Raspberry Pi that’s behind an always-on VPN (Mullvad). You search for movies/shows with Sonarr/Radarr, which browses torrent trackers with Prowlarr, and sends the torrent to QBittorrent. QBT then moves downloaded files to the Seeding directory, where they’re automatically copied into the media directory. Jellyfin then automatically scans for new content and fetches Metadata to make it look pretty.

    Your family wouldn’t need to do any fancy port stuff, you’d just need to create accounts on your Jellyfin server and have them log in. All you’d need to port forward is a port for Jellyfin.

    edit: I read over the post again and you could definitely take out the whole automated part with Sonarr/Radarr/Prowlarr and just manually search for torrents and the end experience would be the same for your family, just a little more tedious if you get a lot of requests

    • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      That’s a really cool setup! And the diagram too! How did you draw that? XD

      Also, a stupid question, since the Jellyfin connection will be going in and out through my public router, unencrypted, won’t media consumption through it look like downloading or the likes? Jellyfin sessions aren’t looked for by the powers that be? XD

      • Kaul@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        Thanks! I used LibreOffice Draw so it was pretty easy to make.

        To be honest, it probably would be best to use a VPN to get into your home network to watch the content if you wanna be extra-safe. I kind of just run under the assumption that I can always claim it’s my media since it’s all downloaded on a separate connection. I suppose if I ever get a notice of some sort, I’ll switch over to a VPN, but currently it’s working fine for me to have it ran through a domain and makes it a lot easier for family members to use.