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Automating My Plex Server
I have been running my Plex server since approximately 2015 and I have always been too lazy to automate the workflow. Often, it is jokingly said that developers spend countless hours automating workflows that takes a few minutes to complete by hand. Ironically, this is probably one of the few cases where I could have benefited by setting up the automation much sooner. I am mildly ashamed to say that I have wasted countless hours over the past 10 years by not automating requests and downloads. Introduction Initially, I installed Plex on a Chinese Windows 2-in-1 Tablet in order to share my downloaded content for online Movie Nights. If I remember correctly, it must have been running Windows 8. Even from the start, the storage was mounted remotely via Google Cloud Drive with rclone. In those days rclone could not mount on Windows, because WinFSP had not been developed yet. This meant that we ran a Linux Virtual Machine with VMware just so that we could take advantage of the unlimited Google drive storage provided by Gsuite. Eventually, the unlimited storage had come to an end, but I was able to pool my local drives with Drivepool for Windows. Luckily the desktop tower case that I had at the time (the Fractal R2) could fit something like 14 3.5" hard drives as well as 2 2.5" drives. With that realization, I added a PCIE card Mini-SAS connector so that I could add an addition 8 hard drives. As Google wisened up and closed their unlimited storage service plan, I migrated my content locally. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough local storage and ended up losing more than half my library at the time. I knew the day would come, but it was still a sad day. That brings me to my current setup, which is still running on Windows 10 and is still just a ghetto JBOD (just a bunch of drives). What makes it great, however, is the recently added power of automation through docker. Motivation So what finally got me off my lazy ass and down this rabbithole of Sonarr, Radarr, and Overseer? It was a combination of several factors. Earlier this year, I had discovered Coolify and finally figured out how Nginx works. I recently discovered Portainer, and docker desktop for Windows finally fixed several known memory leaks. Unironically, discovering Portainer changed the way I run apps and kicked off my self hosting journey. Prior to using Portainer, I had a lot of concerns regarding data loss and recovery when running docker. Putting it all together Finally, after figuring out a consistent way to run docker containers without the risk of losing data, I was ready to start the setup. In the past, I had tried setting my homelab on a separate machine using proxmox, but found that it was incredibly hard to change my IP. As we do frequently change ISPs I figured I would skip out on proxmox this time. What I do miss, however, is how easy it was to remote desktop into a proxmox environment out of the box. So naturally, you would think that I just decided to host it on simple distro like Ubuntu server or just plain Ubuntu. What I ended up doing was going the lazy route, which was to host sonarr and radarr on my existing plex server. In hindsight, what would have made more sense was to install the *arr application on a separate Linux machine and map the existing network drive, but don't fix what isn't broken. So I finally setup my instance following the TechHutTv guides. The guides are a fantastic resource and very flexible. In his particular example, he tunnels all his traffic through Wireguard, whereas I am not. Overall, there were a few hiccups, but once I got it setup, it worked pretty flawlessly. (Hopefully I am not jinxing myself) I was able to setup: Sonarr - for shows Radarr - for movies Prowlarr - for indexing torrents Overseerr - for making requests Flaresolverr - for bypassing cloudflare Qbittorrent - as the torrent client The largest issue that I ran into was due to pathing, as I was originally trying to use the Windows qbittorrent client instead of the docker image. With that out of the way, all that was left was some tweaking to the quality settings and preferences in codec types. For the most part, I am able to sit back and let Sonarr and Radarr handle incoming requests with little fuss or intervention. Of course, I still do occasionally check other sources in the event a show/movie is not available, but for now, I am quite pleased that the setup is working after a weekend's worth of effort. Lessons Learned Don't be afraid to automate things, it will save you time (sometimes)
Oct 15, 2025
Saying Goodbye to Windows (Windows 10 EOL)
With the end of life of Windows 10 and the stringent hardware requirements of Windows 11, users are left stranded without a secure path forward. Introduction With the new online account requirements during Windows 11 installation, forced ads within the operating system, Windows recall, and the ever increasing telemetry data mining, Microsoft is doing their best to alienate their user base. Ironically, statcounter was reporting that they had a spike in Windows 7 devices on various website they are tracking. (Unsure of how accurate this really is, however) Some users are opting to try and bypass the TPM 2.0 requirements of Windows 11, while others are opting for Linux as an alternate operating system. With the steady progress that Valve has been making towards Wine and Proton, Linux has become a more viable solution for gamers as well as the average Windows users. Personally, on my Plex server, out of sheer laziness, I have opted to extend my Windows 10 support for another year, as I do not want to: Upgrade my hardware to support Windows 11 Completely reinstall a Linux distro and refomat the 100+ TB of data Despite my laziness to change the OS of my media server, (my mentality at this point is to not "fix" anything that is not broken), I have tried out a few distros as my daily driver to see what the switching out of Windows would look like. On said journey to replace Windows, it turns out that I am fairly unopinionated in what my desktop experience is like as long as I am able to run these few applications. Visual studio code Postman Plex media player Parsec Brave Steam Discord Even prior to the Windows 10 EOL date, I have been using Linux Mint, which is a debian based distro that is very user friendly. Since then, I have also installed Fedora with the KDE plasma desktop environment, and aside from using a different package manager to install applications, my user experience has been mostly the same. Honestly, my workflow does not require a specific distro or operating system as I am effectively just working with Visual Studio Code and the browser. (The soy boy development environment) My active personal projects are using Next.js and pocket pages with turbopack, which have had no issues on Windows as well as on Linux. Frankly speaking, it may be even running better on Linux. My biggest issue right now is not having a great remote desktop application to remotely access my personal machine. On Windows, Parsec has been a great way for me to remote into various machines, but Parsec unfortunately does not have a hosting feature on Linux. As such, I have been looking into Rustdesk to see if that would adequately support use cases and it appears that tentatively, it will. I will still need additional configuration in order to able to remotely access my machines from outside the network, but this is a decent start. Aside from my remote desktop woes, Fedora, so far seems to be stable and working well. Although I have only been using it less than a week, I am finding that it is more stable than Linux Mint, which is somewhat surprising. Another distro I am planning on checking out would be Arch, but for now, Fedora and Linux Mint are both serving me well. I would honestly recommend looking into Linux as a viable alternative (Assuming you are not mainly using proprietary software in your daily workflow that is not available outside of the Windows/Mac ecosystem) Lessons Learned Fuck Microsoft
Oct 10, 2025