Author: erik

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How to use a custom certificate with Plex

If you run your own Plex server it would be nice to not get a certificate error when you surf to it in your browser. You could use something like Lets Encrypt if your server is publicly available but I wouldn’t recommend having your Plex server publicly available. So what I have done is created a custom top level domain that is local to my network so I have an easy to remember host name. But that also means I have to create my own certificate authority.

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Migrating Plex TrueNAS plugin to a custom jail

TrueNAS includes a set of plugins that will configure a certain application in a jail, for instance Plex. It’s a really nice feature, it works and it’s easy to use. But for long term use the plugins tend to not work as well. I’ve seen issues keeping the jail up to date, both with the latest release of Plex but also with the latest release of FreeBSD. For long term use a custom jail is a better choice since you have much more control over it. Here I will show how you can migrate Plex already running as a plugin to a custom jail on TrueNAS.

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Using Podget to download podcasts for Plex on TrueNAS

Plex has support for podcasts and web shows (which I henceforth will refer to as video podcasts) but I’ve never been a fan of their implementation. You can only listen to podcasts offline on Android (I have at least not seen a download feature on other platforms that I use) and there are constant problems with resuming playback where I left off. For video podcasts I have never seen an option to download them on any platform.

Therefore I have been searching for an alternative solution that still would work with Plex and that solution is called Podget. Podget is basically just a bash-script that can download any podcast that supplies a RSS-feed. So the idea is that Podget will download the episodes into a folder Plex can read from. Here is how I set it up in a jail on TrueNAS.

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Backing up a Linux server using FreeNAS – harder than you would think

I recently finished building a new FreeNAS machine, my first actually. One of the goals for the machine was to use it to backup my servers. My requirements were the following:

  • It needs to be able to backup an entire Linux server ( / ) but some paths needs to be excluded like /dev and /proc.
  • It should not put too much strain on the server that is being backed up.
  • The FreeNAS server needs to initiate the backup. It’s behind NAT and I don’t want to open up any ports.
  • It would be very beneficial if the UID and GID of the files and folders are kept. So this is not strictly a requirement but I very much would like this feature.
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How to check if your server or any services needs restarting with Nagios

If you are running a Linux server that don’t have rebootless kernel patching like KernelCare or Canonical Livepatch then chances are you are running an out of date kernel. And that is understandable because keep tracking of new kernels and rebooting your servers isn’t fun. But Nagios can do that job for you, or at least the part of looking for a new kernel, and then notify you of when it’s time to reboot! That way you don’t have to worry about being vulnerable to known kernel exploits just because you haven’t rebooted your server.

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Two 950 Pro 512GB in raid0 vs one 970 Evo Plus 2TB

I’ve been running two Samsung 950 Pro 512GB in raid0 for a total of 1TB of NVMe storage as my boot drive in my desktop PC. I didn’t really want to run raid0 originally but I started with one drive and it turned out to not be enough space so I added another one a couple of years ago. Now I’ve used almost 900GB so it was time for an upgrade, I blame all these huge modern games. Continue reading “Two 950 Pro 512GB in raid0 vs one 970 Evo Plus 2TB”