Amateur Linux Hour

[Betonhaus]

One of the bad things about Zorin is that its software base is pretty old now.

Oh yeah it's Ubuntu 20.04 based. Which surprised me, but turned out to mean that the fucking Smart board drivers I've spent a month trying to get to work right under Kubuntu and even Ubuntu 20.04 LTS installed and worked perfectly on the first try. That speaks more for the nonsense from that company I can literally see it's headquarters from my house, but if Zorin is aiming for good compatibility it makes sense.
I suspect that tiny sliver of a perk will break with Zorin 17 comes out. But it is nice and stable.

 

[Betonhaus]

...setting up my server and i'm getting more then a little annoyed at how things like "do not put the computer to sleep when the laptop lid is closed, instead turn off the display" requires an ungodly amount of research and writing for what would be just a few mouseclicks for a GUI, and all the guides are assuming you have a gui. And installing LXDE broke my ethernet port and i don't know how, so i'm going to try to fix it by upgrading to ubuntu 22.04 from ubuntu 20.04 (because the Ubuntu 22.04 installer did not support MBR/CSM booting).

this will very clearly not be a weekend project. But if I can get it to the point where I can plug it in by the router and just SSH in I'll be happy.

 

[Betonhaus]

I'm at the point where everything pretty much works, but I'm not entirely sure how it works. so i will not be enabling remote access until i fully understand how everything works. but I got sonarr, radarr, prowlarr, qbittorrent-nox, jellyfin, alienfx, samba, and a gui that's disabled until needed.

 

[Betonhaus]

sonarr is a pile of horseshit when it comes to anime, it's very difficult to get it to download anime with englsh subs

..hopefully putting a whitelist of approved and banned tags works

 

[Betonhaus]

Alright, I have a question about permissions.

My partition setup is this:
Boot SSD: 100gb OS partition, 900gb partition mounted at /srv/data
HDD: 1tb partition mounted at /srv/media
When I reinstall with Debian I'll likely change them to /data and /media in the root folder

The relevant file structure:
srv/data/downloads: all incomplete torrents, only uTorrent needs read write delete permissions
srv/data/complete: all completed downloads, uTorrent, Sonarr, Radarr, and other *arr's need read write delete permissions
srv/media/shows: Sonarr and Jellyfin need read write delete permissions
srv/media/movies: Radarr and Jellyfin *...

uTorrent, Sonarr, Radarr, Jellyfin, and so on all have their own user, but they use the same group. uTorrent has its own group

Should I just chown 777 the whole thing? If I did fuck up permissions what would be the best way to fix them? I can use download categories so that any other downloads get sent to a different folder

I would likely want to put the server on the internet for jellyfin and Minecraft access, with admin acces possibly blocked except through vpn or mac address filtering or something. This would be with a clean minimalistic install of debian, set up with swizzle

 

[Betonhaus]

Since this seems to have become the Betonhaus Bitches About Linux thread i might as well post it's stunning resolution, where I give up and call Linux a shambling patchwork mess of miscellaneous shit with subcomponents that only barely understand each other with the assistance of more components that attempt to organize the mess by making it much much worse. I'll be backing up my media drive to convert it to NTFS, then nuking linux and installing Windows and setting up my server that way

The End

 

[Susanna]

Since this seems to have become the Betonhaus Bitches About Linux thread i might as well post it's stunning resolution, where I give up and call Linux a shambling patchwork mess of miscellaneous shit with subcomponents that only barely understand each other with the assistance of more components that attempt to organize the mess by making it much much worse. I'll be backing up my media drive to convert it to NTFS, then nuking linux and installing Windows and setting up my server that way

The End

If your data is so unimportant that you can trust it to a non-ZFS filesystem, yeah, you might as well not bother with Linux.

 

[GreenTips]

Did you read the documentation?

 

[Betonhaus]

Did you read the documentation?

to the best of my ability. the documentation is very patchwork, 90% of it being things that would be a checkmark in windows GUI but instead involves spending hours to a day learning a specific command function and the exact syntax needed to do what you need it to do WITHOUT breaking a bunch of other things.

 

[Yandex Captcha Solver]

1tb partition mounted at /srv/media

Why did you mount your drive within /srv/? That is for static webpages. It should be mounted on /mnt/.

When I reinstall with Debian I'll likely change them to /data and /media in the root folder

Do not put your hard drive within /media either, that is for removable storage. Use /mnt/ and have it mount on boot within you /etc/fstab file.

do any of you have htpcs setup for streaming, and how do you do it?

Spoiler: Rambling of my setup over the years

I use docker and docker-compose.yml files for all my services under a docker user that doesn't do anything else. I use linuxserver.io docker containers as everything is consistent between the docker setup. To update I just run 'docker-compose pull && docker-compose up -d". Each compose file is set within it's own folder where the config and other program data is stored on my SSD array. Then all of my media files are stored on my ZFS share located within mnt with a proper hierarchy. /mnt/zfs/media/tv shows/showname/season/episode

I rarely have an issue with any of my docker containers. I backup the directories that are stored on my SSD array to my ZFS share that has been alive for over 10 years now. If I reinstall Debian or install another distro on my server I just restore my docker-compose.yml with the config data, pull and start the docker. Takes a hour or so to get everything back running nice and smooth. I've had RHEL, Debian, Alpine, openSUSE, various VMs run my ZFS shares and docker containers. I started with Debian and finally ended up with Debian for my server.

I used to use usenet for sonarr/radarr/jellyfin with great luck. Torrents suck comparatively. I don't watch anime so don't know much about it with these services, there is probably a dedicated anime *arr program out there.

If you want to watch you media on the go though. I would strongly suggest not opening up random ports to the outside. I would go with a reverse proxy solution with cloudflare argo tunnels or by setting up wireguard/openvpn then connecting to the VPN to manage your home server and services.

Nowadays I use Kodi with the Fen addon, syncing my watch data to trakt.tv and jellyfin. This requires a debrid subscription, costs $4 a month, but I can watch 1080p movies or tv shows on the fly and don't need to upgrade my 32tb server for more storage which is getting close to being full. I still download movies/tv shows that I rewatch from time to time. Fen will pull from my local ZFS share before searching for external sources.

For my HTPC setup, I have an old thinkpad that is docked. Running Arch built with the default archinstall script, with plasma selected as my inital DE and plasma-bigscreen as my DE which is perfect for a TV. Use a mini keyboard to navigate, then use firefox with ublock/sponsorblock to watch youtube/rumble/odysee. Play games with moonlight-qt which allows me to remote play from my desktop on my TV. Emulation Station-DE is my default app for managing my games to play, works well with a controller, and works with Lutris, Steam, and emulated systems.

After using a Raspberry PI 4 I had lying around for Kodi, it was rough and slow. The laptop can handle so much more and cost me 40 bucks which included a 500gb SSD (has a broken screen and I had an old dock lying around), much cheaper than a RPI. It is much more versatile as there was no RPI solution that could handle what I wanted. A NUC, old Optiplex, or something similar would do just fine as well for a HTPC.

would be a checkmark in windows GUI but instead involves spending hours to a day learning a specific command function and the exact syntax needed to do what you need it to do WITHOUT breaking a bunch of other things

GUIs suck ass for server stuff, they limit options 90% of the time or take way longer than to type a few words into the CLI. If you realllllly need some type of GUI/TUI for server management, there is YaST which is exceptionally good GUI/TUI for basic system management only on openSUSE. Then there is the Web UI tool Webmin which I wasn't a fan of. There may be some more, but ehh, there is a reason why CLI is the standard for admin work.

 

[SleepingBull]

Why did you mount your drive within /srv/? That is for static webpages. It should be mounted on /mnt/.

Do not put your hard drive within /media either, that is for removable storage. Use /mnt/ and have it mount on boot within you /etc/fstab file.

Alright, since a question about this has been nagging me for awhile and I'm still in the moving in process having switched my laptop over to linux: Does any of this actually formally matter?
Like, I understand general guideline best practice stuff. Except I grew up along with windows, being a former user of everything from 95 to 10, so I know exactly which folder an application is supposed put its saved data.
With that kind of cavalier thinking in mind, is there any reason not to just mount the hard drive to... ah fuck it, let me just run a quick mkdir. Erm, make that a sudo mkdir. Right, here we go: /cdrive/. Boom. Mount it there. Why not? What benefit does any other option give?

 

[Susanna]

Alright, since a question about this has been nagging me for awhile and I'm still in the moving in process having switched my laptop over to linux: Does any of this actually formally matter?
Like, I understand general guideline best practice stuff. Except I grew up along with windows, being a former user of everything from 95 to 10, so I know exactly which folder an application is supposed put its saved data.
With that kind of cavalier thinking in mind, is there any reason not to just mount the hard drive to... ah fuck it, let me just run a quick mkdir. Erm, make that a sudo mkdir. Right, here we go: /cdrive/. Boom. Mount it there. Why not? What benefit does any other option give?

Your method works fine. They’re just conventions. If you open a removable drive in your DE it’s going to show up under its UUID in /media/, if you launch apache without specifying otherwise it’s going to host /srv/ etc. /mnt/ in itself is useless, just something some autist back in the day always used to mount his drive and wrote into some manual somewhere. For example I mount my NAS to /bulk and my Nix store to /nix even though these aren’t part of any standard, anything works. The convention is mostly there to keep you from having to reinvent the wheel every system. Software goes into /usr/bin except sometimes it goes in /bin or /opt. You could tell your package manager to install software into /Software if you wanted, as long as it’s in your path variable it’ll work just fine. In fact there are distros that do just this.

 

[Yandex Captcha Solver]

Alright, since a question about this has been nagging me for awhile and I'm still in the moving in process having switched my laptop over to linux: Does any of this actually formally matter?
Like, I understand general guideline best practice stuff. Except I grew up along with windows, being a former user of everything from 95 to 10, so I know exactly which folder an application is supposed put its saved data.
With that kind of cavalier thinking in mind, is there any reason not to just mount the hard drive to... ah fuck it, let me just run a quick mkdir. Erm, make that a sudo mkdir. Right, here we go: /cdrive/. Boom. Mount it there. Why not? What benefit does any other option give?

Permissions could be an issue. You might not be able to navigate inside some root level folders without the complete path without being in the right group. Applications may as well not like that directory, i.e. found this blog post where Plex refused to use a drive under /media for it's media library because they see it as a temporarily mounted storage.

There really isn't a good reason to go outside the standards unless you work for a business that is consistently following a non-standard standard.

 

[y a t s]

Alright, since a question about this has been nagging me for awhile and I'm still in the moving in process having switched my laptop over to linux: Does any of this actually formally matter?
Like, I understand general guideline best practice stuff. Except I grew up along with windows, being a former user of everything from 95 to 10, so I know exactly which folder an application is supposed put its saved data.
With that kind of cavalier thinking in mind, is there any reason not to just mount the hard drive to... ah fuck it, let me just run a quick mkdir. Erm, make that a sudo mkdir. Right, here we go: /cdrive/. Boom. Mount it there. Why not? What benefit does any other option give?

Linux gives you the power to make your own decisions as to your setup, as inadvisable as they may be. The "everything is a file" unix philosophy enables a massive amount of customization.

Any of these rules are a suggestion, which you are free to ignore. However, these conventions primarily exist to have some agreement between developers as to where certain files should be kept. If you know what you're doing, you can put files wherever you like and compile programs that don't offer overrides to point to the right paths. It's usually not worth the effort, as it will be almost guaranteed to cause headaches, sometimes years after. Setups that require heavy levels of modification become increasingly difficult to maintain. It's important to take the time to set things up properly, with consideration for future setups and needs. It's very possible a program may use a directory by default that could easily break things in complex setups. Additionally, package managers often don't like unexpected files.

Another very important thing to consider is permissions. Default setups typically have sensible permissions for different directories and their purposes. You can put binaries wherever you like, but ones that are system-critical shouldn't be modifiable by any unprivileged user. There are plenty of permissions related flags and attributes which are much more nuanced than simple chmod/chown stuff, and it's usually best to go with the consensus on best practices.

 

[Betonhaus]

update:
I got some sleep, took my meds, and figured out how to view and edit access control lists using the webmin gui.

I will likely still reinstall as things are kinda hacky and there's enough mistakes that i need a clean slate, but I'll be using debian and swizzle

 

[Betonhaus]

everything works now. Except i should probably look into switching to usenet

 

[Jump]

Is there any great reason to run Debian 12 over 11?

My happy life with Windows 7 is finally coming to an end now that Brave and some other apps I use wont work with W7 anymore. I have a few different things I am using raspi's for and they are all running 11 because thats what most raspberry pi stuff still targets. I am somewhat tech lazy and I think it would be nice to just use the same OS on everything for simplicity. I don't game and my laptop is an old business class Dell i5.

 

[CryoRevival #SJ-112]

sonarr is a pile of horseshit when it comes to anime, it's very difficult to get it to download anime with englsh subs

..hopefully putting a whitelist of approved and banned tags works

TRaSH-Guides will show you how to set those up properly if you haven't already, including setting up anime selection. You should be running separate Sonarr and Radarr instances for Anime content as the metadata standards are different and it will get fucky if you mix them.

You can use Recyclarr to set up the TRaSH Guide automatically, but it sounds like you want to understand what's actually going on, so by hand will probably be better for you.

It's also advisable to use Gluetun, a VPN tunnel and killswitch if you use docker. Here's a good guide, it is not hard and creates some separation of concerns.

Jellyseerr is also great if you have other users, so they can request stuff via the automation system without accessing the Arr stack interfaces.

everything works now. Except i should probably look into switching to usenet

Both are good and have their place.

___

Oh... you gave up.

 

[Betonhaus]

Oh... you gave up.

No, the setup under swizzle and Debian seems to be fine. For Sonarr I ended up creating a download profile that blacklisted "vostfr" and whitelisted words like "horrible subs" "subs please" "eng" "muti-subs" which are associated with an "anime" tag that I attach to all the anime. It seems to be working. I have to tweak the profiles so they don't try to download 50gb movies though, that's just excessive

I did instally crafty controller on top of it, but I can't really set up proper DNS access for both at the same time so I have it turned off for now.

 

[Jump]

Is there any great reason to run Debian 12 over 11?

My happy life with Windows 7 is finally coming to an end now that Brave and some other apps I use wont work with W7 anymore. I have a few different things I am using raspi's for and they are all running 11 because thats what most raspberry pi stuff still targets. I am somewhat tech lazy and I think it would be nice to just use the same OS on everything for simplicity. I don't game and my laptop is an old business class Dell i5.

After spending some time researching it I'll just answer my own question.

For my use case it doesn't matter.

The LTS support is for 5 years and another group ELTS supports the releases for 10 years for major fixes.
There is nothing drastically different with 11 vs 12. 12 comes with Linux 6.1 long term support release, current release is 6.3.
There are some bigger changes with Gnome but fuck Gnome.
12 ships with KDE 5.27. 11 shipped with 5.20. No big change there. Everything else I may use is also just refreshing. 11 to 12 looks nice and boring.
So I'll just install 12 since I don't see anything that will upset my autism hopping back and forth between 11 pi's and my main PC running 12.

Thanks for reading my blogpost.