README.md

This is my configuration that works for me the best for my use case of an all in one media server. This is not meant to be a tutorial by any means as it does require some knowledge to get setup. I'm happy to help out as best as I can and welcome any updates/fixes/pulls to make it better and more helpful to others.

Change Log

Home Configuration

• Verizon Gigabit FIOS
• Google Drive with an Encrypted Media Folder
• Ubuntu Linux 20.04
• Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz
• 32 GB of Memory
• 250 GB SSD Storage for my root
• 6TB mirrored for staging

My Workflow

I use Sonarr and Radarr in conjuction with NZBGet and qBittorrent to get my media.

My normal flow is that they grab a file, download it and place it in /gmedia under the correct spot of /gmedia/TV /gmedia/Movies respectively and that is locally-stored underneath the covers.

Each night, a rclone upload scripts moves from local to my Google Drive. To achieve this, I use rclone to mount my Google Drive and mergerfs to combine a local disk and Google Drive together to provide a single access point for all the services.

Rclone and MergerFS

Installation

My Ubuntu setup:

[felix@gemini ~]$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Release:	20.04
Codename:	focal

Fuse needs to be installed for a rclone mount to function. allow-other is for my use and not recommended for shared servers as it allows any user to see a rclone mount. I am on a dedicated server that only I use so that is why I uncomment it.

$ sudo apt install fuse

You need to make the change to /etc/fuse.conf to allow_other by uncommenting the last line by and remove the # from the last line.

sudo vi /etc/fuse.conf
root@gemini:~# cat /etc/fuse.conf
# /etc/fuse.conf - Configuration file for Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE)

# Set the maximum number of FUSE mounts allowed to non-root users.
# The default is 1000.
#mount_max = 1000

# Allow non-root users to specify the allow_other or allow_root mount options.
user_allow_other

After fuse is installed, I install mergerfs. I would grab the proper package from the GitHub repository as the packages are out of date.

My use case for mergerfs is that I always want to write to the local disk first and all my applications (Sonarr/Radarr/Plex/Emby/any application) all point directly to /gmedia. For them it's not relevant if the file is local or remote as they should act the same.

/gmedia
    /local (local mirror disk)
    /GD (rclone mount)

My rclone.conf has an entry for the Google Drive connection and and encrypted folder in my Google Drive called media. I mount media with a rclone script to display the decrypted contents to my server.

My rclone looks like: rclone.conf

This is my current rclone.service file which has the mount settings documented in it rclone.service

They all get mounted up via my systemd scripts as it goes in order of mounting my rclone, running a file to warm up the cache and the mergerfs mount last.

My gmedia starts up items in order:

1. rclone service This is the standard rclone mount and the post exec command allows for the prefetching of the directory and file structure in a single systemd file to simplify things.
2. mergerfs service This needs to be named the same as the mount point for the mount to work properly. I use /gmedia so the file is named accordingly.

mergerfs configuration

This is located over here if you want to request help or compile from source mergerfs@github

I found unionfs to not do what I wanted and I can't stand the hidden files so for my, it's much easier to configure and use mergerfs.

The following options make it always write to the first disk in the mount as with post 2.25 there are some changes with the settings so I had to add a few things that were default before.

-o rw,use_ino,allow_other,func.getattr=newest,category.action=all,category.create=ff,cache.files=partial,dropcacheonclose=true

Important items:

• use_ino is for hard linking with Sonarr/Radarr.
• auto_cache has been replaced by cache.files=auto-full and uses memory for caching and helps out a bit if you have extra memory to spare.
• category.action=all,category.create=ff says to always create directories / files on the first listed mount point and for my configuration that is my /data/local
• if you are reading directly from your rclone mount, you do not need to worry about any of the mergerfs settings.

Scheduled Nightly Uploads

I moved my files to my GD every ngiht via a cron job and an upload cloud script. This leverages an excludes file which gets rid of partials and my torrent directory.

This is my cron entry:

# Cloud Upload
12 3 * * * /opt/rclone/scripts/upload_cloud

This is my only upload to my Google Drive minus subtitles so I can this at 700GB per day to not hit the 750GB daily upload quota that is published by Google.

Plex Tweaks

If you have a lot of directories and files, it might be helpful to increase the file watchers by adding this to your /etc/sysctl.conf and rebooting. I choose the number below as I wanted to have plenty of capacity over the default.

# Plex optimizations
fs.inotify.max_user_watches=262144

These tips and more for Linux can be found at the Plex Forum Linux Tips

Reducing API USage / Save Download Quota

There are a number of things I make sure are off in my setup to ensure that my API calls are lower and that I do not hit the download quotas for the day.

Plex

• Enable Thumbnail previews - Off_ - This creates a full read of the file to generate the preview and is set per library that is setup
• Perform extensive media analysis during maintenance - This is under scheduled tasks and this does a full download and is ony used for bandwidth analysis with streaming.

Sonarr/Radarr

• Analyse video files Off - This does full downloads to perform analysis and should be turned off as this happens frequently on library refreshes, if left on.

Caddy Proxy Server

I use Caddy to server majority of my things as I plug directly into Google Authentication oAuth to make life easier. I have this as a toggle as I at times use Cloudflare for a CDN.

My configuration is here

OpenVPN Configuration

For all my private traffic, I use TorGuard as they support port forwarding and have very good support.

Setup and Configuration