IT Homelab

[Fishy]

had a chat with Virgin.. upgraded to the 1gb to the house for an extra pound... new hub arrrived... put into modem mode and connected up to my asus router and away we go,,,, may look for a router with a 2.5 gb port on it...

[Fishy]

Built my own bare metal pfsense with a 10gb card..

[Fishy]

retiring my Asus router which has been a stalwart for the last 10-15 years in place of the pfsense which is flying.. thought i'd try setting up wireguard on it for full tunnel vpn back to the house... openvpn took about 10 mins.. wireguard took me about a day and half...... was worth  it tho....

[Fishy]

Just setup my pfsense box with nordvpn.. now got my torrent box running thru the openvpn connection.. nice..

[Fishy]

Ditched nordvpn.. got a refund.. grabbed PIA.. half the price....

[Fishy]

Pia with wireguard  now setup on pfsense..

[pxr5]

I've been installing, configuring and tweaking the Arr suite of apps for the last couple of weeks. I've been using Usenet for a long time but have always managed everything manually. However the only indexer I was using (since 2012) went down for a site rebuild, and the fact I've only been using one provider, made me think I need some contingency in my set up. I've been using my current system like this since 2008 and I really needed to change how I was dealing with all this. So after scrounging invites to a couple of decent indexers on Reddit, and along with my current top-tier indexer, I also added a block account provider (from another backbone to my current provider) to compliment my main one. Okay, armed with what I need it was time to automate with the Arrs. I'd dabbled with Couchpotato, Sickbeard, Sickrage and some others in the past and had a rough idea what to do but the current systems are based around the Arrs (and much more advanced and user-friendly than the aforementioned apps) and are all very similar in their operation. This is all for Usenet btw, I stopped using Torrents when Nzbs became popular but these Arr apps do work with Bittorrent too if that's your bag.

So I started with Sonarr for TV shows (which is probably the most complex of the suite) - once I got this going I thought the rest should follow on easily. I was going to containerise but as I have a mini PC running 24/7 I installed to bare metal on Windows 11 Pro instead (I may still use Docker in the future though). These apps have come a long way in their useability and getting going was quite straightforward. I did struggle a bit with Release Profiles and Custom Formats but after some initial issues I tried my set up against one currently airing show (actually Married at First Sight Australia which is almost a daily release) and I managed to get the automation running well. There are some helpful guides in the Arr wikis and Trash guides which helped a lot. I then started to bring shows in one at a time and after a week or so I had everything running smoothly - of course I'm checking and tweaking all the time but I think I have it now. Next was Radarr for movies which was relatively simple after configuring Sonar and had it up and running quite quickly - of course quite a few tweaks to get it fully automated. After that was Lidarr - Usenet isn't the best for music but Lidarr is, at least, a good repository as a reminder and calendar for future releases. Interestingly, there is a python app called Soularr that integrates Lidarr with Soulseek (Slskd only) and I might look into that in the future. Once those 3 were done and working, next was Prowlarr. This one is an Indexer manager. So instead of having to add indexers to Sonarr, Radarr and Lidarr each time, Prowlarr contains the indexers and links to those 3 Arr apps with their APIs - very clever.

So that's it for now. There are other Arr programs e.g. Tdarr (automatic transcoding of media), Bazarr (subtitles) Readarr (books), Whisparr (Pr0n) Mylar3 (Comics), NzbHydra2 (similar to Prowlarr), Overseerr and Ombi (user requesting), NZB360 (a control app for phones) and many more: https://locatarr.github.io/. All these apps are free and very well supported and maintained too - https://wiki.servarr.com/

[Fishy]

Been tinkering a bit.. upgraded by veeam backup box to Windows server 2025 and also my DC and. DHCP vm boxes..all nice n easy .. an Esxi and vcsa upgrade as well..

[Fishy]

Thinking of ditching VMware and trying xcp ng

[Fishy]

Thinking of ditching VMware and trying xcp ng

Setup a spare box with xcp ng..doesn't work with veeam which is a bit of a deal breaker for me at the mo.. looks pretty decent and was easy to convert an existing vm..

[Slim]

Dug out my old Acer Cloudbook - a lightweight little laptop with SSD. Still works really well with Linux Mint and I've installed the latest version. It's about 8 years old I think but still snappy. Might take it on holiday.

[The Picnic Wasp]

You have no idea how much I wish I could understand all this. I feel I've really missed out on a major part of human development.

[Fishy]

Started a Truenas build to see how it is with shared storage for my Esxi hosts... to be continued once we get back from Madrid later today..

[Fishy]

Started a Truenas build to see how it is with shared storage for my Esxi hosts... to be continued once we get back from Madrid later today..

Built and working nicely..think I'll stick with it

[Fishy]

Also built a Debian docker vm for apache guacamole..nice n secure Remote Desktop access for windows/ Linux boxes thru a browser