RPi 4 NAS w/ Auto-Torrent (WIP)

Projects Jun 1, 2021

Note: This guide is strictly for educational and experimental purposes and I am in no way condoning the use, nor advocacy, of software to acquire copyrighted media content. Please watch your favorite movies or TV via Netflix, Disney +, Amazon Prime Video, HBO, etc.

I've taken snippets of code and of other similar guides to compile this guide. All references are at the end.

This guide assumes basic knowledge of linux commands. If you are unsure, please refer to the man page of each command.

Step 0: Prerequisites

Upon completion, this server should be able to the following:

Automatically download all your favorite TV shows and immediately after they air/become available
Have all of your media neatly organized and named consistently
Be able to network stream content to any device

Hardware Needed:

Raspberry Pi 4 (2gb +)
Micro SD Card (16 GB minimum; 32 GB recommended)
Hard Drive or SSD (Ideally 2+ TB)
USB 3 Enclosure for Hard Drive/SSD
All necessary cables (power, data, network, etc.)

Software that will be used:

OS: Raspberry Pi OS (32 bit) Lite
VPN: Private Internet Access - OpenVPN w/ IPTables
Torrent Client: Deluge
Movie Fetcher: Radarr
TV Fetcher: Sonarr
Subtitles Fetcher: Bazarr
Tracker Consolidation (Optional): Jackett
Media Solution: SMB Sharing via Samba and/or Jellyfin (not covered)

1 Basic Setup

Download the OS file and use balenaetcher, or your tool of choice, to format the SD card into a bootable disk.

Insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi, and start connecting the wiring, do NOT connect power yet.

You should have the following devices connected to the Raspberry Pi: Display Output, Ethernet, Keyboard, Hard Drive Enclosure (with Formatted Hard Drive inside), and optionally a mouse.

Take note of the IP Address on LAN: 11.1.1.175

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y 
sudo apt autoremove -y
sudo raspi-config

The following must be done in Raspi-Config:

[1] [3] Password
[1] [4] Hostname - I changed to Piplex
[1] [5] Boot Status - I changed to Boot with Login
[3] [2] SSH - MUST enable
[5] [2] Time Zone - Optional
[5] [3] For Logitech K120 - Generic 104 key - Other - US - English US - First Option for both
[8] Run once before rebooting

Reboot the Raspberry Pi

sudo reboot now

1.1 Static IP

For setting up the Static IP I followed this guide. Here are the necessary steps:

Let’s first retrieve the currently defined router for your network by running the following command.

ip r | grep default

By using this command, you should get a result similar to the one we have below.

default via 192.168.0.1 dev eth0 proto dhcp src 192.168.0.159 metric 202

Make a note of the first IP mentioned in this string.

Next, let us also retrieve the current DNS server.

sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf

From this command, you should see the lines of text below.

# Generated by resolvconf
nameserver 192.168.0.1

Ctrl-X to exit

Make a note of the IP next to “nameserver“. This will define the name server in our next few steps.

Now that we have retrieved both our current “router” IP and the nameserver IP we can proceed to modify the “dhcpcd.conf” configuration file by running the command below.

This config file allows us to modify the way the Raspberry Pi handles the network.

sudo nano /etc/dhcpcd.conf

Within this file, enter the following lines.

First, you have to decide if you want to set the static IP for your “eth0” (Ethernet) connector or you “wlan0” (WiFi) connection. Decide which one you want and replace “<NETWORK>” with it.

Make sure you replace “<STATICIP>” with the IP address that you want to assign to your Raspberry Pi. Make sure this is not an IP that could be easily attached to another device on your network.

Replace “<ROUTERIP>” with the IP address that you retrieved in step 1 of this tutorial

Finally, replace “<DNSIP>” with the IP of the domain name server you want to utilize.

This address is either the IP you got in step 2 of this tutorial or another one such as Googles “8.8.8.8” or CloudFlare’s “1.1.1.1“.
Append this to the bottom of the file in the following format

interface <NETWORK>
static ip_address=<STATICIP>/24
static routers=<ROUTERIP>
static domain_name_servers=<DNSIP>

My config was the following: (8.8.8.8 was for PIA)

interface eth0
static ip_address=11.1.100/24
static routers=11.1.1.1
static domain_name_servers=8.8.8.8 11.1.1.1

Prior to restarting, run either:

hostname -I
or 
ifconfig

This will spit out the current IP address

sudo reboot now

After rebooting, check that this has changed.

1.2 Key Verification

Another tool that is useful to set up is Key Verification, this allows us to skip entering our password when we enter.

I ran these commands in Powershell from my C:\Users\Vedan\ folder to add the key to piplex.

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "youremail@example.com"
ssh pi@piplex
mkdir .ssh
exit
cat id_rsa.pub | ssh pi@piplex 'cat - >> /home/pi/.ssh/authorized_keys'

1.3 External Drive Mount

Let's now mount the external hard drive to the Raspberry Pi. I have used this guide to set this up.

USB drives should be automatically mounted when it is connected to the Pi. If you want to check where your drive has been mounted, you can simply use the following command.

sudo cat /proc/mounts

I wasn't able to find my hard drive, so I had to look for a troubleshooting step.

I added the following lines before exit 0 in /etc/rc.local

sleep 20
sudo mount -a

2 More Networking

Next let's set up Samba Shares. This should allow us to access the filesystem of the Raspberry Pi from any device on the network. I used this guide to set up Samba.

We can install the packages that we require to setup Samba by running the following command.