dmention7

I say "proper" rack because I was going cheap and didn't realize this one uses threaded holes for mounting instead of the square holes + cage nuts like a big boy rack. (The uprights actually have the square holes on the sides, but the way it assembles, they are just about 1/2" too narrow to accommodate rack mount equipment)

Nothing too crazy... AT&T craptacular modem, Ubiquiti gateway, couple of switches, media server chock full of refurb drives, pihole to keep the ads away, and an ancient laptop for a console. But it was all scattered on some plastic shelving before... Now it's at least on a wheeled rack where it kinda looks like I know what I'm doing.

Next step is cleaning up the cabinet above it, including a giant mess of coax cables lying in a heap 😅

For background, i have a few hundred torrented movies that I have been downloading to / seeding directly from a folder structure set up for Plex/Jellyfin. Media library is a mix of ripped and downloaded content. Till now I have been using a client on my desktop to manage the files on my media server, but now qbittorent and radarr live on the media server where they should be.

I struggled for a bit to get qbittorent and radarr set up and hardlinking properly, and am now ready to start migrating all those torrents into the proper location. What I'm doing works, but it feels like I'm doing something the long way.

Here's what I'm currently doing:

• Move torrent from media library to torrent folder
• Copy/paste torrent link from desktop client to media server client and verify that it's seen properly
• Add movie(s) in radarr, but do not tell it to begin searching for it
• Select Manual Import / Interactive Import
• Check the appropriate media file(s) and allow radarr to Import them to the movies I just added.

If that's more or less the best way to do it, I will chug through since it seems to be working. It just seems like adding the movie before importing is superfluous, since radarr has no problem matching up the media file the correct movie once it has been added.

TIA!

I've been kind of piece-mealing my way towards cleaning up my media server, and could use a little advice on the next steps.

Currently I have a little under 10TB of torrented media that I have been downloading to / seeding from media library folders that Plex and Jellyfin monitor, using my desktop PC as the torrenting client. This requires a bit of manual maintenance--i.e., manually selecting the destination folder for the torrents in a way that Plex/Jellyfin can see.

I recently fired up qBittorrent on my media server (Unraid if that matters), and would like to try out some of the *arrs, but I'm not quite sure how to proceed without creating some kind of unholy mess.

I guess option A is just to import all of my current torrented content from desktop to media server client, and keep manually specifying the torrent destination. It's not a huge deal, since I am typically only adding a few torrents per week, so it's literal seconds or minutes of work to find the content I want.

Option B is to start "clean" and follow one of the many how-tos for starting up an *arr stack. But never having used the software, I don't have a good sense for how it works, and whether there are any pitfalls to watch out for when trying to spin it up with an existing media library that includes both torrented and ripped content.

From a bit of reading, I think radarr for example will only care about new content. So I should be able to migrate all my existing torrents to the new client on my media server, including their existing locations amongst my media library, and then just let radarr locate and manage new content. Is that correct?

Any other advice or suggestions I should be considering?

It's probably a stupid question... But if I notice I'm not getting much upload activity on my seeds, I'll often intentionally just hop over to a random country and see what happens. For example last night I noticed that my uploads had been limited to 1 or 2 <100kB/s peers for the last few days while connected to a US server. Clicked over to a Venezuelan server and almost immediately got about 20 connections that have been sitting between 5-10MB/s total upload ever since.

Makes me feel like an international Johnny Appleseed, except with media and stuff. 😎 Though it's a little surprising to me that there would be such a huge difference in seeding effectiveness depending on where your VPN's endpoint is. Whatever works I guess!

The only downside is it can make web browsing and shopping a bit of a pain. But that's my own fault for not taking 10 minutes to figure out how to set up split tunneling or just hosting qBittorrent on my media server...

EDIT: On rumba's advice I enabled port forwarding in my VPN and qBittorrent client, and now all is well.

Not sure if this is the best place to post, but I imagine plenty of ya'll rip your discs either for backup or media server purposes. So I'm curious what you have found to work best / most reliably for ripping 4k discs, and if you have any tips for getting stubborn discs to rip well.

Personally I have an LG WH16NS40 internal drive and an LG BP60NB10 external drive, both flashed with Libredrive to allow 4k ripping, using MakeMKV. Generally they work pretty well, but I will occasionally get a stubborn disc (often from the library, sometimes even new) that just refuses to fully rip on either drive.

Lemon pledge and a microfiber cloth, followed by a microfiber lens wipe, clean up most grubby used discs. But you can only do so much if the disc is physically damaged.

So what's in your toolkit?

I normally have pretty basic tastes when it comes to sandwiches: meat, cheese, mayo, a spread of some kind and/or lettuce if I have some on hand. But it's nice to throw in something different now and then.

Sticking to one or two ingredients (this is the dull men's club after all) how do you all like to kick up your sandwiches a bit?

I'll start-- it's nothing crazy, but Aldi sells a Bavarian sweet mustard that's a really nice step up from regular yellow mustard for a ham & swiss.

I've noticed for awhile now that whenever my Ender 3 S1 Pro is running, some of the lights on the same circuit will flicker seemingly in time with changes in X or Y stage movement. I'd guess that it's a combination of these stages causing minor voltage spikes/dips when they accelerate, and certain cheaper LED bulbs don't tolerate those spikes/dips well.

Has anyone else experienced this and implemented a good fix? It seems like some kind of power smoothing/conditioning filter plugged in between the printer and the wall would help isolate it. Most of those devices seem designed to isolate the device from fluctuations in the mains, and I'm not sure if it generally works both ways (seems like it should...)

Googling around most people are blaming similar issues on poor wiring, which I suppose could be the case even though this is a newer house. But I see very little in terms of actual proven effective fixes, even though it sounds pretty straightforward on its face.

Advice / thoughts?

I'm planning to print up a bunch of brackets to mount LED shop lights (very similar to these) to the ceiling in my garage. My plan is to use an upside-down "U" shape bracket that screws into a joist/drywall anchor in the middle and then sort of clips around the sides of the metal frame.

Maybe filament type doesn't matter much here, but I'd rather not come out to one of the lights having fallen on my car if I can help it 😅

I think the main considerations are just temperature and stiffness. It can get up to about 85F in the garage on the hottest summer days, and probably a few degrees warmer by the ceiling. The lamps are cheap LED tubes, so the metal housing only gets slightly warm to the touch (say 90-100F or so). I know PLA is a bit stiffer at room temp, but I'm worried it might soften too much at the worst case of warm temperatures.

Any thoughts on PLA vs PETG for this situation?