Just wanted to say thank you to everyone in the community for being awesome, this is not a help request just me being super happy that I have finally overcome one of the biggest challenges I set for myself with self-hosting, making a media server that I can add media to at any time from anywhere in the world so that my family and I, located on different continents, can immediately enjoy it!

My Raspberry Pi started out as just a simple Nextcloud box that I could access outside the home to escape from the Dropboxes and Google Drives of the world.

I ended up finding out everything that I can do with it and became more and more enthralled and tried to challenge myself. I learned so much about NFS, config files, iptables, and Linux/networking in general that I feel the knowledge itself was worth the struggle.

While I have more than a few programs on there, the most challenging thing has been this (which I just now put the final touches on accomplishing):

  1. Have a Jellyfin server on the Pi which can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

  2. Be able to add media to Jellyfin via torrent.

  3. Used a separate (very old, Windows XP era) 32-bit computer only to be a torrent box (running latest Debian). I connect to my VPN provider via openvpn on the command line with transmission-daemon running behind that. However, I want to be able to add a torrent from anywhere in the world at any time and I cannot do that if transmission-daemon is hiding behind a VPN. Therefore I need to be able to create an ssh tunnel, but I can’t do that if the entire server is behind a VPN! Therefore I had to learn to mess with iptables and ip rules, but I was able to make SSH use the default network while everything else uses the VPN, and so now I can ssh tunnel from outside the home network and open transmission in a browser that way.

  4. Since I am using two separate machines (the torrent box for downloading torrents and the Raspberry Pi for hosting the media server), I created an NFS share on the Raspberry Pi where the media would sit and mounted it on the torrent box, having all finished media files be placed in there.

  5. I set up Jellyfin to refresh every 6 hours to update the media that I now have.

If anybody here is trying to do this and is having issues, I’m happy to answer any questions!