Whatever you reason: let’s get you started!

Let me know if you’re taking me up on the offer or feel free to ask me directly if you’re more comfortable with that.

Happy New Year!

Agree with everybody else here: don’t pay anyone for this.
We’re all a bunch of people hating that everything costs so much, so we selfhost what we can.

Use us, learn from our mistakes, make your own and start over when you fuck up to badly. We’ve all done it and still do it.
We’ll hold your hand every time you come back and ask for help, as long as you’ve shown at least a tiny bit of effort on your end.

Depending on your timezone, I could hop in a quick Discord call and nudge you in the right direction if it gets you going. I have some experience with ADHD so I know from second hand experience how you feel.
My TZ is CET.

Best of luck anyways!

Nice!

We always get to mountain, then run out of steam before restarting a few months later.
Have fun!

I agree.

Separate NAS/storage from server for some redundancy, and flexibility. SMB or NFS for access to files.
It’s also nice paying a premium but letting someone else be responsible for keeping it running.

If you have a distaste for Synology after their recent antics, then go with someone else.

I’d say go with a 4-bay and put two disks in, then you have loads of room to expand in the future. This is mainly because of Jellyfin and how these libraries have a tendency to grow a lot with time.

You’re not wrong, but I think you might be leaving some future capabilities on the table, that’s it.
There is nothing wrong with running everything through Portainer at all. It’s how I started myself. The downside is that it’s limited if you ever wish to do e.g. HA OS or a sandboxed OS for testing/playing around. Automatic backups, re-sizing LXC’s or giving more memory is also easier to do with a GUI than in CLI. At least for me hehe.

That’s the great thing about self hosting though: if you’re happy with it, then it’s perfect!
Don’t change anything because someone tells you to if it works for you, friend!

Yeah it’s a bit of an unfair comparison that. Hypervisor VS conainer manager.
The reason you run Proxmox is to do «everything» in one place, including docker.

If all you host are containers, then I agree it’s overkill, but if you want VM’s and containers combined, maybe even in a cluster, then Proxmox is hard to beat.

I host LXC’s with Portainer inside Proxmox, as I find it easier to deal with and maintain. Then in a VM I run the full HomeAssistant OS instead of the Docker image.

Unless you don’t need it at all, I’d recommend you give it another try. It’s a very flexible system that «does it all» once you get going.

They also made the best plasma TV’s back in the day!

Yeah I can’t argue with that, it’s more that I have no financial gain in this setup, so every redundancy set up costs me directly. At some point I have to say that it’s good enough.

It’s always a trade-off I guess, with cost being the deciding factor.
If I ever build a new house, I’m having a proper rack with room for a redundant server for sure!

Yep, can confirm.
I usually wait for seasons if it’s a show I don’t know when I will have time to watch, just to get it as freeleech.
It’s usually always there when I check after a few days.

Like others have said, I also prefer having a backup and getting new HW when shit hits the fan.
You can build a warm-standby solution, but that road is both costly and more labor intensive.

The family can survive for a few hours while I run out to get a new drive or NUC to fix stuff.
If you’re lucky, it happens right after dinner so you can skip clean-up too!

I have three servers running these days.
One is a NAS that hosts the .arr suite and my torrent client. This is just to keep the media management in one place.
A N100 NUC that runs a lot of stuff in Proxmox, like Jellyfin, Heimdal, HomeAssistant, PiHole, Tailscale. I hope to add Caddy to this in the future, but I’ve never played with a reverse proxy before so I’m a tiny bit scared hehe.
Lastly is a inudstrial PC I got from work that hosts game servers. Right now it’s down as we haven’t had time to game, but usually it’s either a Minecraft server or Valheim.

For backup I have one copy on the NAS and I upload the most critical data to a cloud service I trust and pay for. This is now Proton.
My dream is finding a tech friend with his/her own NAS so we can set up a encrypted partition on each others NASes for automatic backup. I give you 1 TB, you give me 1 TB, life’s good!

As with most things: it depends…

If you’re in a country where ISP’s freely give out user info, I’d say you should have a VPN.
If you’re on a private tracker, you might not need it, but you never know if the people hunting pirates managed to get in there too.
I don’t use one as our ISP’s mostly throw those letters in the trash and I’m in a private tracker, but your mileage may vary.

To get started, you only need a server (like Jellyfin or Plex) and a torrent client. Then you can automate it with the .arr stack, such as Radarr and Sonarr, race others with autodl-issri/Autobrr, share your media with friends and family with open ports (not recommended) or Tailscale/Netbird…
It gets as advanced as you yourself want it to be.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions, not just about piracy but how to set things up in general.
Good luck, and remember to have fun while doing it. If you don’t, you won’t bother keeping it updated and working in the future.

Webrips. That’s how we get movies and shows today without waiting for physical media being released

He didn’t. He said people who parrot it are.
Unless you do, there is no reason to be offended. Up to you.

And no; realistically, if you lose Visa and Mastercard, you can close shop. Obviously it’s for profit, because a 99% reduction in turnover means all employees out of work.
Yes, I took that number out of thin air, but I know most people would never bother as that is what they have.
Maybe it’s different in your country.

I’ll admit never having used Lidarr, but if it’s dead and no other good automated software exists, I’ll just use the good old “search and click download”-hack.

Hopefully I won’t ever have to do this, but time will tell

Spot on!

The moment music starts being split up between companies is the day I start pirating music again too.
My NAS and media NUC have soon paid for themselves from saving on streaming services. Adding music to it won’t cost me a dime.

You’ve already gotten a lot of really good advice, but I’ll add what I did on TL to get >10 ratio in about a year, without really limiting what I download.

For movies, I focused on finding files >14 GB so they are freelech. For movies I really wanted in super high quality to enjoy, I chose torrents with fewer seeds. This both boosts my points gain and lets me upload more when someone else wants the same file.
My best ratio files are several 70+ GB 4k Remuxes.

For TV Shows, I downloaded complete seasons as they are always freelech, unless it was a show I really want to watch right away.
These days I just add it to Sonarr and let it rip.

It goes without saying that you keep seeding everything for as long as you can. I have several hundred, some people have thousands.

Make sure you start with freeleech content to build a small buffer so you don’t get warnings that stress you out. It sucks frantically trying to get your ratio up before some timer ends and you get banned.

Feel free to ask if you need some more help, and enjoy TL. It’s a really good site run by what seems to be very level headed people.

I don’t know why it wouldn’t be, as they are great products out of the box.
A bit pricy, but worth it. I’d give the same recommendation as you for anyone wanting to dabble a little and have room to grow and play with VLAN’s, ACL’s and expandability in the future.

I’m using a Chromecast with Google TV, simply because that’s what I had when I started.
Hoping a new Shield will come before it dies, alternatively I need to find something else.

After I migrated to a N100 that does all transcoding for me, the media device itself is more about codec support, a nice UI and response times and less about raw power.

Cool, well then I can at least share what I went with that has worked really well: GMKtech N100 NUC from Aliexpress with 16 GB of RAM.

It’s hosting Jellyfin with transcoding, PiHole, Home Assistant, Heimdal, a Valheim server and loads of other small LXC’s in Proxmox.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen it break a sweat.
The NAS holds the .arr stack and Qbit, but that’s it.

I cannot speak to the longevity of it, but I repasted the CPU once I got it and it’s chilling below 45 degrees all day long, so I expect it to last for many years. I also enabled C-states to get idle consumption as low as possible, around 7-8W.

Best of luck with whatever setup you end up with mate!