I have been torrenting the same primitive way for a long time. Turn on a VPN, open up a browser I only use for this purpose, go to tpb or yts, grab my movie, and shut it all down when the movies over.
I’ve only updated my torrent client in this time, the method has not evolved.
Now im interested in self hosting jellyfin with an arr stack, with the end goal being to share it with friends and family outside my lan. I’d like to use docker containers so its all containerized, and of course keep it safe and secure.
What kind of set up, from hardware to software, would you recommend to get this going? Any guides in particular? I’m especially iffy on allowing remote access for non-tech savvy family (like a roku app), so any tips/guide recs for that would be helpful.
I’ve been searching around some and I’ve found a lot of resources but I’d like to get the opinions of people in here before diving in.
I have some beginner questions, for example: if I have the arr stack running in docker with a vpn, can I browse the internet non-anonymously on that same machine without compromising identifying details, assuming qbittorrent is configured to only move traffic through a VPN? (I’m wondering if I need a dedicated piece of hardware to run everything safely)
Tldr: Suggestions or guides for beginner setting up jellyfin/arr/ remote access for family?
The answer to this question is you can setup a docker system (or podman) so that all the traffic in that pod (don’t know the docker term for this) will route through the vpn. A good image to accomplish this easily and successfully is
gluetun
– and it will only affect the traffic in the containers, not the rest of your computer.Personally, my setup is much more like yours and it works fine for me, except I use a VM. So all the activity gets confined to the VM and that makes a bit idiot-proof. Using automatic management in the torrent client, completed torrents get put in the correct directory. You could combine this with Jellyfin if you desired.
My own problem with Jellyfin is if I ever use it for anything I want direct playback on all relevant devices, because my computer is not good enough for transcoding (and why waste the energy and time on on-demand transcoding, anyway?) so it requires some massaging of the data to get everything right. I only use it infrequently, practically on-demand. I don’t use Jellyfin for myself.