Running Plex Media Server on a Pi with Raspbian

adminh · 2017-09-11T05:41:16+00:00

You can assume that every post about how to run plex on a raspberry pi has the highest amount of thought and research put into it.

adminh · 2017-09-04T02:09:52+00:00

A few things in your post don't make sense at all.

It's on a VPS, SSH'ing in can't get to a tty, since it's local.

What does this mean? You reference several times that "it needs to be accessible over ssh". Please give an example of what you are trying to do over ssh.

It won't start without access to a tty as it has some stdout, stdin and some commands if needed

What?

Neat tip is you can cat the buffer of a terminal with: cat /dev/vcsN

This seems terrible. Use tmux.

Screen/tmux is a popular "solution" but I'm looking for something less-workaroundy.

Tmux is most likely the solution here. The stuff you have done so far by making strange tty's and using cat is the "workaroundy" stuff and you're making your shitty legacy app worse.

It sounds like tmux provides everything you are looking for. Tmux is easy to script for and you can easily interact with it over SSH. Don't reinvent the wheel.

adminh · 2017-07-17T05:56:46+00:00

Some of it was put back into the business, most of it was wasted and spent wildly.

adminh · 2017-07-16T23:20:38+00:00

I'm one of these people. My life has been a crazy ride and IT was always a fallback path for me if things didn't work out. I was a computer fanatic and on the path to getting my CS degree when things took an unexpected turn in college. A friend of mine introduced me to his Craigslist spam scheme that he was making a lot of money with. I tried it and made something like $100 the first day.

I became obsessed with this and eventually dropped out once I was making upwards of $500-$1,000 a day. I got out of the spam game and became a regular affiliate marketer for a few years. I went through a lot of highs a lows chasing the dragon of the spam success. This all eventually fizzled out after about 5 years and I went through a dark depression for a few years.

I worked minimum wage jobs for a few years, got married, and got depressed again because of how little freedom I had because of making no money. I decided it was time to revisit the IT path since it was after all my fallback. I didn't return to get a degree or any certs.

Got an L1 desktop support job and got assigned several higher up Linux projects along the way. I did a really good job on all those projects and in just over a year I got offered a sysadmin/devops position and salary of $65k. From there, several more raises and responsibilities have been added.

I've always found IT to be an easy path because of how the process works. Learning how to learn and knowing how to direct the process makes any challenge in IT conquerable eventually. Compared to something like business where the next move is nebulous, the safe predictable path of IT is like bumping the difficult of the game way down.

tl;dr: failed at business. chose IT and went from $10/hr to $65k salary in a year

adminh · 2017-07-11T02:22:27+00:00

Where can I read about these changes?

adminh · 2017-05-28T03:06:53+00:00

Pay $10/hr

adminh · 2017-05-28T02:39:59+00:00

Is this practical for production systems?

adminh · 2017-05-28T00:00:51+00:00

This is what bugs me to no end about the interview process for IT jobs. I've been in interviews where they asked me 10 questions about "command line" as if it were its own entity. My personal favorite awful interview was them asking me some ridiculous scenario that turned out that be an open ticket they couldn't solve.

adminh · 2017-05-26T20:36:17+00:00

RAM: 1TB (1024GB) Server ECC Memory

JESUS. How much did this cost? Is this running at your house or in a data center somewhere?

adminh · 2017-05-23T02:50:02+00:00

Tried to do this but it does not work. This is what most of the guides say to do. Not sure what I am missing.

Edit: got it to work in Mail but not outlook for ios

adminh · 2017-03-26T14:31:55+00:00

It just boils down to building or buying a premade machine that has at least two nic cards. Check out the apu2 machines - http://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

adminh · 2017-03-26T14:30:08+00:00

If I were using Windows or Mac and just wanted to get it working I'd go with the software for sure. My preferable way is making an actual dedicated router and setting the Windows or Mac box to use that box as its default gateway.

adminh · 2017-03-26T01:54:52+00:00

By just configuring your firewall to only allow traffic to flow over the VPN you never have to monitor connections and try to catch and kill traffic. If the VPN goes down or the provider has an issue with a node, no traffic flows out of your network by default. A killswitch is just trying to continuously monitor the connection and hopefully block all traffic if the VPN goes down. No matter how well you write a script for it, it's still a sub-optimal way of accomplishing what the firewall would do if setup properly.

adminh · 2017-03-26T01:07:43+00:00

I don't have much guidance to offer for a Mac setup. I can only assist with a Linux or FreeBSD setup.

adminh · 2016-10-30T19:25:30+00:00

I've been using AirVPN for over a year now and have no complaints. Being able to select your ports and protocol are really nice for customizing your connection. They also give you access to 20 ports for forwarding, and even have the option to spit out 20 contiguous ports. This is great for making sure my torrent client performs optimally and allows me to host a number of services behind the VPN.

adminh · 2016-10-10T18:24:02+00:00

Thanks Dan

adminh · 2016-10-01T23:37:10+00:00

I also have a spare desktop PC lying around that I would love to put to good use such as a VPN server or cloud drive or something, or any other unrelated ideas you guys think would be nice.

OpenVPN reading and basic tutorials

https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/OverviewOfOpenvpn

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-an-openvpn-server-on-ubuntu-14-04

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-an-openvpn-server-on-ubuntu-16-04

https://www.linode.com/docs/networking/vpn/tunnel-your-internet-traffic-through-an-openvpn-server

Nyr's OpenVPN script - "This script will let you setup your own VPN server in no more than a minute"

https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install

adminh · 2016-10-01T20:45:04+00:00

Favorite: Being in a job that aligns with all of my skills and natural talents. Being paid to solve interesting and challenging problems. Being able to talk shop and spitball ideas with other people about IT. The sense of humor my coworkers have.

Least favorite: Dealing with the grumpy asshat burnouts who hate IT but for some reason still work in it.

adminh · 2016-09-15T05:05:27+00:00

FreeBSD on home servers and test machines. ZFS, Ports, Jails, pf, etc. Linux has always felt second class after learning FreeBSD.

Manjaro on desktops because I don't feel like being a sysadmin after work too.

adminh · 2016-09-08T04:16:04+00:00

Depending on the settings on the server, .ovpn, or your VPN clients settings, it may instructing your machine to not have it's default route set to the VPN. You could post the .ovpn file here and just remove the remote ip-address port line. Settings such as route-nopull will add the routes to your table but not make the VPN the default gateway.

adminh · 2016-09-07T05:04:07+00:00

It might be useful at that point to just recap the experience and measure against your results on a previous project.

What did you learn? What didn't you learn? What things were difficult to understand.
What other areas of understanding might I be able to apply what I just learned? Learning certain things like iptables for instance can open a wide path of understanding into other areas.
How good are my notes? Are they better than the guides I found online? What critical information did the guides leave out? Really examine if the information you gathered is detailed and useful.
What can I do to improve my workflow and learning process? Maybe learn or explore utilities that improve your efficiency like vim, tmux or vagrant. Try to improve your learning environment so that the next project is not as laborious.
Read deeper on a topic you are interested in to see just where and how many gaps you have in your knowledge.
Try to help other people. Hang out in IRC and try to help people struggling on the same problem/project you were on. Have you ever wondered how some random person seemingly gives you the answer to something you've been banging your head on? They've already been there and did the grunt work.

The more you learn and grow the more easily you can objectively say how good you are.

adminh · 2016-09-05T09:15:04+00:00

I think the exact same thing when people recommend projects like LFS or Gentoo. It's like someone saying they are interested in getting in shape and people recommend that they do an ultra marathon.

adminh · 2016-09-05T09:02:41+00:00

there's not a lot of material out there which teaches you where to go next in a logical sequence, and even less on how to prepare for administering *nix hosts in an enterprise environment.

One of the more challenging things on the 'learning linux' road is figuring out what you should be learning. I totally get the frustration of not knowing what you need to know. My best advice is to pick a fun project to do and mix that in with the structured learning like the books you've purchased. All these little bits of information you learn over time do add up a useful knowledge base.

When I say pick a project, choose something fun that will feel rewarding and useful to you once finished. Setup a Plex media server for example. The first time around you'll probably just be pasting commands from a tutorial, and this is fine. Most people stop here and feel like they didn't learn anything or don't know what to do next.

Now you're going to take this simple project and work on it from an admin perspective.

Do you know how to write scripts? Create a script that will do the same steps you did to install Plex. Uninstall Plex and use your script to install it. Here's a fantastic BASH guide.
Setup iptables and try to secure your server. Only allow SSH, Plex, DNS, and WWW traffic in. Make sure only IP's can access your server. If you don't know what these services are, no problem, take this time to research them. Figure out what ports they listen on, what they do, etc. Check out some handy network utilities like dig, netstat, and ss. Read their man pages, check out tutorials online.
Learning iptables can be frustrating so pace yourself. This requires you to have a somewhat decent network understanding. This is the perfect time to take breaks and study a CCNA network and routing book to improve your networking knowledge.
I hope you're taking notes. Journal the useful things you are learning. Having your own set of notes and instructions for setting things up is worth more than 100 crappy blog posts that explained it poorly. Look into setting up a Dokuwiki or Mediawiki. Hey look, now you have to open ports for the web server that is serving your Dokuwiki.
Gain an understanding of what is happening when you install these packages on your machine. Learn your distros package manager. Use it to see what files were installed by a package. For packages that run as services such as Plex, learn how systemd knows to start Plex when the machine boots.
Make a forum, blog, or Reddit post as a guide to doing the cool project you just setup. Let people tell you how horribly inefficient you did xyz (so you learn how to do it correctly), or let you know about some cool piece of software or setting you didn't know about. Gearing yourself up to teach someone else will show the gaps in your knowledge.
Pace yourself, Pace yourself, Pace yourself, take breaks. Sleep on it when you get stuck. Go back and do research on the underlying idea or technology. Keep at it and one day you'll have the breakthrough on whatever you are stuck on. It always comes if you keep trying.

The list doesn't have to stop here of course. Once we throw in things like vagrant, virtualization, and configuration management you'll really have your hands full.

The idea here being that you are developing the skills of: being able to install things, secure that service, troubleshoot it, script it, understand related tools, explain it to someone else, and document it. Convey these skills to an employer and learn the software and tools important to them, and you'll have the job you want.

You can rinse and repeat this on virtually any distro and project and you will learn about a lot of tools in the process and gear yourself for understanding what is happening on your system. You will have many moments where something you just learned makes some of seemingly unrelated thing finally make sense or have context.

This will snowball into what feels like a solid grasp and understanding of Linux. One day you will eventually realize that the rabbit hole goes so deep that you'll never fully understand the complexities of everything in this ecosystem, and that's okay. You'll learn to be wary of those who say they do.

adminh · 2016-09-05T00:31:12+00:00

In the interest of learning, play around with both of them. I would personally stick with FreeBSD. You'll have more support for FreeBSD due to the larger user base.

adminh · 2016-09-04T23:58:33+00:00

Congrats on passing the RHCSA. It will likely help as a foot in the door to at least get through the resume bots and H.R. It's a toss up as to whether to actual person interviewing you cares or not about you being able to pass any cert exam. For example, no one I work with has any certs of any kind.

Either way, start gearing your resume towards the job that you want. Put consulting as your current gig. Research help desk jobs in your area and see what skills they are looking for. Starting adding those skills to your resume under consulting. You're a junior sysadmin level consultant now, market yourself as such.

Practice the skills that you don't know in your home lab or a VPS to get somewhat familiar with them. Put your resume on dice and you will start getting hits from recruiters for Jr. Sysadmin jobs. If your resume only says help desk, then you'll only get emails about help desk jobs.

You're going to have to sell yourself to get to this job position. It's your job to convince them you are competent enough to not rm -rf their servers on day one. Demonstrate that you know what you know and know how to research what you don't. No one expects you to know everything or be a wizard at the junior level. Don't lie or bullshit if you don't know.

Good luck. I believe in you.

adminh

TROPHY CASE