Because buying the solution is boring!
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 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.
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.