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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