Because buying the solution is boring!
Step-by-step instructions you can follow from start to finish. Focused on clarity, repeatability, and avoiding common pitfalls.
If you’re building a NAS at home, you’ll eventually hit the same fork in the road I did: TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault, or just buy a QNAP (or even a DAS). On paper they all solve the same problem. In reality, they’re very different tools with very different tradeoffs.
I’ve used or seriously evaluated all of them while building my Plex, torrent, and media automation setup. This post breaks down the real pros and cons, then explains exactly why I landed on OpenMediaVault.
When people talk about upgrading their home network, they usually assume downtime is unavoidable. Devices disconnect, credentials change, and someone in the house inevitably gets frustrated. My goal was different: I wanted a seamless network migration where I could replace Google WiFi with ASUS hardware without touching a single device.
This article documents what I actually did not what a textbook migration looks like.
I didn’t create an IoT only Wi-Fi network because it was trendy. I did it because it’s best practice for a reason and my home network was proving that the hard way. Random disconnects, smart devices refusing to reconnect, and small configuration changes turning into full outages made it obvious that everything sharing one network was a bad idea.
This post explains why separating smart devices onto an IoT only Wi-Fi network is one of the most practical and stability-focused decisions I’ve made, and why I won’t be merging them back.
This post covers how I secure my torrent box so it only runs torrents when the VPN is active. No firewall killswitch, no Docker, no pretending it’s more complicated than it is.
The goal is simple:
This is a service-level enforcement model using systemd:
qbittorrent-vpn.service requires pia-vpn.service
This post documents how I believe you should be securing your indexers; primarily Prowlarr, Sonarr and Radarr, along with the automation services that depend on it behind an always-on VPN using custom systemd scripts.
These services do not download torrents themselves, but they make constant outbound requests to indexers and third-party APIs. I don’t want that traffic coming directly from my home IP.
The goal is simple and strict: if the VPN isn’t up, the indexers should not be running.
If you search for “install Sonarr on Linux,” you’ll find plenty of guides telling you to add a repo, install Mono, and call it a day. On Raspbian, that advice is outdated and mostly broken.
I hit this wall myself. The traditional Sonarr install steps that work on Ubuntu or Debian-based servers either fail outright or leave you with a non-functional service on Raspberry Pi. This article documents what actually works on Raspbian today.
Sonarr is one of those tools that feels optional until you use it for a week—then you wonder how you ever managed TV shows manually. This post walks through installing Sonarr on a Linux-based system, assuming you already have basic Linux access and aren’t afraid of the terminal.
If Linux still feels unfamiliar, I strongly recommend reading A Beginner’s Guide to Linux first. It explains distributions, package managers, and basic commands used throughout this guide.
Radarr is one of those tools that quietly becomes critical once you start using it. It handles movie monitoring, quality upgrades, and automation, and it does it well. In this post, I’ll walk through how I install Radarr on a Linux-based system using the official repository.
If you’re brand new to Linux concepts like package managers, services, or the terminal, I strongly recommend starting withA Beginner’s Guide to Linux before continuing.
If you’re running a media automation stack on Linux, Prowlarr is one of those tools that quietly makes everything else less painful. It centralizes indexer management for Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, and friends, so you’re not reconfiguring the same indexers over and over again.
This post walks through how I install Prowlarr on a Linux-based system using the official method. I’m assuming you already have a basic Linux install up and running. If not, start with A Beginner’s Guide to Linux before continuing.