The original post: /r/piracy by /u/roukem on 2025-02-19 16:08:24.
I've been tinkering for the past year on and off with my homelab to get a media server up and running. Currently, I have an Asustor NAS that I purchased which stores all my media, and Jellyfin running in a docker container on the NAS. I'm using a reverse proxy (running on a separate pi) to point my dns to the jellyfin for remote access. I then have a separate, old windows desktop that I converted to do all my torrenting, but it saves everything onto the NAS. The reason I set it up this way was to have my torrents running through my VPN client (protonvpn) while the rest of the media streaming/playing/etc could be done direct. The NAS does not support split-tunnelling for a VPN connection, so I thought this would be the next best option for what I had on hand. Up until now, this has worked out for me locally. Now that I have started diving into remote access with the dream of sharing it with family, and allowing them to request content to add onto the server/etc, I'm looking to expand.
Just in the past day or two, I've started looking into all the arr's. I started with Sonarr and installed the windows client on the same machine as where I download my torrents. One of the first steps in that configuration is to set the "root folder", which looks like it is required to be on the same machine. According to the sonarr documentation, "This is the folder where your series and episodes are stored for your media player to play them. It is NOT where you download files to!" To me, those are one and the same. But I've also been unsure on the concept of torrents and seeding. Does moving the media file from the .parts file kill the seed? Or is that just something else I need to configure? (Using qbittorrent, btw.)
So I guess my question is if someone could help me understand the best practices for setting all this up? Is it best to download everything to a temporary "downloads" folder, and then manually (or do the arr's automate this?) move the media files to the NAS where they are played from? And then follow up question, does that mean the arr's should be installed on my NAS and not from where the torrenting is done so that the "root folder" can be selected on the NAS directories? I'm totally prepared for someone to say this is the worst implementation they've ever seen. Open to any and all suggestions from small config changes to redesigning my entire homelab architecture. Thanks!