Because buying the solution is boring!
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.
Why you need Tailscale becomes obvious the moment you want secure, reliable access to your home network from anywhere without opening ports or exposing services to the internet. This post explains why you need Tailscale, and why I intentionally treat my Plex server as the only entry point into my network.
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’re running a self-hosted media setup, Sonarr, Radarr, and Prowlarr are usually mentioned together — but it’s not always obvious why. They aren’t redundant, and they don’t do the same job. Each one handles a specific part of the pipeline, and when wired correctly, the whole system mostly runs itself.
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 On Raspbian, that advice is outdated and mostly broken.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.
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.