Raspberry π

I was planning on setting up a Plex server today and hooking it up to my NTFS formatted external 4TB HDD, but I've realised I'm going to want to read and write to that disk from other computers. I had planned on using my Draytek router to get the drive on the network, but that's a non-starter as the Draytek manual says it needs to be FAT32 and no bigger than 4GB so I guess I want to use some kind of file server on the Pi too?

The Plex server tutorial says it runs on Rasbian, but I'll probably want to do a few other things eventually like try home assistant, a podcast aggregator etc. etc.

So I guess my question is which OS for:

Plex server,
File/FTP server ,
Home Assistant,
Podcast aggregator?

Edit: I think all of this can be done via Rasbian with the exception of HA which I don't need in my life right now anyway, so I'll just use Noobs / Raspbian and try and get the Plex server up and running for now. Apparently that can read NTFS ok.

I finally got my Raspberry pi set up (it involved a lot of cursing around network shares and permissions, particularly when I accidentally overwrote the fstab file and everything became read only).

Not quite sure about the speed though. Repairing a downloaded 30GB file with pars looks like it may take the best part of a day. Is the 4 much faster than a 3b+?

Also, a couple of housekeeping questions.

How are people backing up their pis? I could just take the card out and back it up but I'd prefer something more maintenance free. It's for access to network drives so the obvious seems to be to back up to there.

Can you get the pi (raspbian) to auto update? M fine with it randomly restarting when it needs to.

. Is the 4 much faster than a 3b+

I've been using a 2gb pi4 as my main work computer for nearly a month. Compiling large and complex executables. I've been really impressed. 4k60hz display, handles compilation and browsing really well, decent thermal efficiency also.

I haven't done anything like what you are doing but I can confirm that the 4 is fuck loads faster than a 3b+.

I only decided to try it out of curiosity while my wife borrowed my desk and I couldn't be bothered to move my PC. The fact I haven't moved back should indicate how happy I am with the Pi4!

Cheers. Fuck loads sounds like what I'm after.

So it turns out that the Pi setup I thought I'd sorted (apart from being underpowered which was going to be solved by a pi 4) isn't actually worked as I hoped due to the bane of my linux life, permissions.

I have a variety of network drives (on a windows machine) mapped to the Pi via fstab. All is fine, I can see those folders and go into them and read and write. When my download program (Sonarr) downloads (via SABNZBD) and copies those files to the correct network folder it doesn't work though. I get an error message saying "Access to the path is denied".

Any thoughts on why it thinks access is denied? Is Sonarr somehow running as a different user, I know sometimes some shit gets installed under its own user? Is there any way to check this? Any other obvious things I should do?
Cheers

Any thoughts on why it thinks access is denied? Is Sonarr somehow running as a different user

If you run top from the command line while sonarr is running it should show you which account it is running under.

My setup is nas & mac mini but running all the same software & when I had similar issues I think I resolved it by putting the full path to my mapped nas drive (which lives in /volumes/...etcetc on my mac) in sonarr as the default location for each show rather than the user friendly mapping which appeared in the finder. I then also had to update each pre-existing show.

-r to recursively change perms on all sub files and folders?

Annoyingly Kano (kids Pi Linux distribution) aren't aiming to support the Pi 4, and the latest Kano OS is based on Raspbian Stretch which doesn't boot on a Pi 4 (you need Raspbian Buster).

(I'd bought a Pi 4 to replace my daughters Pi 3 - which I'll use for a different project.)

There is a way to hack around it by upgrading the underlying Raspbian distrib by disabling the kano autoupdater, but it isn't officially supported by Kano.

Kano have also said their strategic platform is a SFF Windows 10 machine. Ugh.

using sonarr series editor you can see where each series is trying to put its files.

Cheers @HatBeard and @Stonehedge, that's given me a few things to look into.

I've just realised it's actually radarr, not sonarr, but the two are pretty much identical.

yeah they're pretty much interchangeable (though I use almost never use my radarr install but have stuff coming in from sonarr daily).

I have a variety of network drives (on a windows machine) mapped to the Pi via fstab.

Window mount with linux FSs are a pain.

A few starter questions might be: How are they mapped (NSF / SMB etc.)? What's the /etc/fstab line? what does $mount show? What do the logs show?

Are you using it with the WiFi or is it plugged in?

Was on WiFi only although I've switched back to my main PC to do some CAD stuff now.

So I seem to have fixed the permissions problem. Added uid=1000,gid=1000 to my fstab. I'd already tried uid=pi but it seems some of the earlier versions of Samba don't support passing non-numeric userids.

It seems to be crashing quite a bit though and I'm wondering if the power supply isn't enough. I remember previously that it was very picky about power supplies and cables and would show some graphic if underpowered. How do I do this using terminal?

The only thing I can find is this
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=147781&start=50#p972790
but the output (generally along the lines of 0x80000) doesn't seem to match up to the stuff this has.
Should I be converting this hex to binary and then it's the position of the 1s which indicates the error? What is position 0?
Cheers

vgencmd outputs hex which you need to convert to binary. Position 0 is undervolt detected if set to 1.

https://harlemsquirrel.github.io/shell/2019/01/05/monitoring-raspberry-pi-power-and-thermal-issues.html

EDIT: Don't forget that you work from right to left with binary in terms of register numbers

Cheers. That's much clearer.

Looks like I'm hitting temperature limits occasionally. I think I may need to get the dremel out and add some ventilation to my case. The stock pi case doesn't seem designed for airflow.

Upgrading to a Pi 4 seems to have speeded things up a bit and improved stability. Just found some more Pis so it seems I have four standard ones of varying vintage and two zeros. Need to work out what I'm doing with them and probably get rid of some older ones.

I can highly recommend a case like this for Pi4 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/for-Raspberry-Pi-4-Model-B-Aluminum-Case-Passive-Cooling-Aluminum-Alloy-Pr-I6M9/362967021701?epid=20034378788&hash=item5482853885:g:UY0AAOSwUwRekBG0

If you're hitting heat limits in normal use, there is definitely something wrong with your case. Have you installed heatsinks? Only cost a couple of quid and make a big difference...

That's a good looking case

Looks good, but really works for passive cooling too. I bought a similar case and my pi4 tops out at about 60 degrees after twenty mins of 100% load.

Good that the headers are exposed, which is usually lacking on the nicer looking cases such as the FLIRC.

I've got a heatsink but also got this case with bugger all ventilation (hence the dremel plan).

It's repairing 20GB RAR files which tends to be a bit of a killer. Can be a couple of hours of 100% CPU

I've got one of those cases. Well made but not the most practical. Just pop the top off and it'll be fine :D

This is a pi4 with heatsinks and hyperpixel 4 screen in a case I 3d printed.

It's not doing the heaviest of crunching but rarely goes above 50 degrees despite only having minimal airflow. As long as there is somewhere for heat to escape, you should be golden.

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