this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
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It was way easier than I thought it would be to get started. I put Sparky Linux on an 18 year old laptop and moved a bunch of movies and shows over to it, got Tailscale squared away, and now I can watch my media ANY WHERE IN THE WORLD. The only problem is storage. Jellyfin doesn't recognize my external drive for some reason and says the path is invalid. Is there a simple solution I'm missing?

Also I'm just stoked I was able to do this. I know I just followed a recipe, but it's a pretty cool feeling having all my music and shows right there, and I don't have to pay some middle man one red can't to access media I already own.

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[–] UntimedDiffusion@piefed.zip 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Are you on Windows or Linux? If Linux, is jellyfin installed on docker or from your package manager? The drive is mounted right?

[–] MostRegularPeople@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Linux. Jellyfin was installed via package manager. I'm to dumb for docker. Yes, the drive is mounted.

[–] determinist@kbin.earth 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Check permissions of the external drive, and set owner to jellyfin group. Give rw permissions to that group/drive. I went through similar with my external drives. It was a permissions issue.

[–] flying_gel@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Read permissions should be enough, I've got mine in a freebsd jail with the media dataset mounted into it read only.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I'd do read/write and enable nfo files alongside the media files.
Then I'd use an admin account for admin stuff and a regular user without any edit permissions.

[–] UntimedDiffusion@piefed.zip 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah I reread the part where you said you installed Linux lol. On top of checking permissions also check user ownership of the media. I believe a normal jellyfin install uses your user rather than it's own system user

[–] MostRegularPeople@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

I will do that! I asked this question right before I went on a work trip, which was a dumb move, but I'll do that. Thanks for the advice!

[–] aarRJaay@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

Installing Linux and running a service is hard and if you're only going to be running Jellyfin then most people would say that's the best way to go (and probably much much harder than just doing a docker-compose up command which is pretty much what I did). Well done on getting it going. I've been running it a few weeks at home, yesterday I got to test it out remotely, I was stunned that even with my rubbish home internet, it ran flawlessly!