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! 🥰
It’s not fairly easy :/ … Specially if you want something that works flawlessly over time !
Maybe for most IT workers, yes it’s easy… But if you are starting out right with 0 knowledge with docker, networking, VPN, gluetun, multi-arch player (tvOS, android TV, Linux, Android, MacOS, iOS), linux, private tracker, exposing your media securely, arr stack configuration… You name it !
Naaah it’s not fairly easy if you’re just starting out !
If you really want to get in to media sharing. I think it is a good idea to learn at least some of the basics about Linux and docker (with compose). It will make your life a load easier. Forget about the client for just a bit. Most of the time that’s just a app you install and login to. But without the server side done. It is fairly useless.
If you truly wish to not look in to that. While I am not a fan of doing it that way… You can setup a read only smb share with the media files and let people access it over a VPN.
The 3 basic things I would get started with is Linux. Docker with compose and a VPN. VPN can be tied in using docker. Look at wg-easy for that.
I wouldn’t mess with any of the other things you mentioned yet. Also if you need help with any of those things I mentioned. Feel free to ask for help with it. Their is a great community willing to help.