Media Server Setup

Terminology

• media-server : The remote server you are about to configure
• host-server : The host machine you are working on
• NAS : Network attached storage server

Follow these instruction to set up your environment.

#1. Set up ssh key based login to the media-server

a. Generate a ssh keypair if you don't already have it in your host-server. (Check using ls ~/.ssh)

ssh-keygen

b. Copy the public key to the media-server

ssh-copy-id username@media-server-ip-or-hostname

c. Test with logging in

ssh username@media-server-ip-or-hostname

#2. Install Ansible in your host machine

Linux

sudo apt update && sudo apt install ansible

#3. Install Ansible community plugins in your host machine

ansible-galaxy collection install community.docker

#4. Port forward your internet facing router

• External port 443 should be forwarded to your media-server port 443.
• Access your router admin page to do it.

Google it if you have no idea what this is.

#5. Register a free DuckDNS for free hostname

• Visit https://www.duckdns.org/ and register a free account there.
• Note down the token for the created account. Use it as the gv_duckdns_token variable in ansible-playbook/inventories/default/group_vars/all.yml
• Add a new domain name there and note down it. Use it as the gv_server_domain_name variable in ansible-playbook/inventories/default/group_vars/all.yml

#6. Configure ansible playbook

Update hosts

update the ansible-playbook/inventories/default/hosts.ini file with your media-server ip address or hostname

Configure

Edit the file ansible-playbook/inventories/default/group_vars/all.yml and update variables if needed. Read following section and App Specific configuration to get a better understanding variables and their usage.

App specific configuration

NFS

If using a NFS share mount role, make sure on the NAS server side,

1. Create dedicated user and a group on the NAS server and note down uid and gid
2. Use user/group mapping when creating the data set in your storage pools
3. Use user/group mapping when creating the share. (e.g : Mapall User and Mapall Group in TrueNAS).
4. Update local_media_uid and local_media_gid in inventories/default/group_vars/all.yml accordingly.

VPN

• Disable VPN if not needed by seeting gv_add_vpn_container to false

transmission

• Enable/Disable using transmission_enable variable in the role. Enabled by default

qbittorrent

• Enable/Disable using qbittorrent_enable variable in the role. Disabled by default
• Default username is admin, password is adminadmin, change it via the webui.

#7. Start installation

Once the configuration is updated and then only use following command to start the installation

cd ansible-playbook
./install.sh

Once the installation script completed successfully. Visit https://www.hostname-you-configured to visit the dashboard.

#8 Register the SSL cert against the let's encrypt production servers

• For the initial setup we registered the domain SSL against the staging servers of Let's Encrypt service. This will result in a browser complaint stating that your connection is not secure. This step in place to avoid let's encrypt service from banning you for multiple unsuccessful requests if we got anything wrong in the setup.

If everything looks good after the first install, (Check logs of swag container server on the media-server : docker logs -f swag) set gv_use_lets_encrypt_staging_server to false and rerun the ./install.sh script.

Container Stack operations

Once the installation is complete, you can use following commands from your host machine to start/stop all apps.

Start all container stacks

cd ansible-playbook
./start-all.sh

Stop all container stacks

cd ansible-playbook
./stop-all.sh

Manual operations

Find and delete downloaded files 16 days ago

find .  -mtime +16 -exec rm -rf {} \;