Linux with plex and utorrent on an N54l, feasible?

[GSV]Lemming · 13 Jul 2020 at 13:20

Hi all, I am not getting enough bandwidth from my router at one end of the house, to my desktop at the other end of the house, I have decided to put an N54l in place to cover my Utorrent needs and to also act as a plex server as my old NAS with files on cannot run it due to hardware.

I was thinking of using a linux distro to run both plex server and utorrent, I am not expecting it to be able to transcode if needed, but if it does then great! I would however like to be able to have a shared folder so when I download torrent files on my desktop it would save them to a folder where the N54l would automatically see them and kick off a torrent.

Anyone here done as above, and if so which linux OS would you recommend?

Is this feasible, or should I just put W10 on it and accept the OS overhead?

Evilpaul · 14 Jul 2020 at 10:01

I run XPEnology on my N54L which gives me Samba shares, Plex, Transmission and Sonarr. It does the job pretty well and has been running in this configuration for most of the 7 years I've owned it. Initially I did run it as a Debian box with manually configured apps/services, but after a bit of a disaster I decided to use XPEnology to save having to reconfigure so much stuff myself.

There are definitely limitations to what you can use the N54L for, it was underpowered in it's day and that was some time ago. As you mentioned transcoding is not really going to be feasible, I ensure everything is direct play only which works well even for 4k files.

[GSV]Lemming · 14 Jul 2020 at 11:32

Thanks for that. I have looked at xpenology and it looked like a viable solution, just very alien for an intrinsic windows user. Just a case of gritting teeth and going for it I suppose.

Does transmission work well for picking up torrent files from an N54L share accessed by a windows machine?

When I was young I loved pointless challenges installing OS's and solutions, now I struggle to build enthusiasm but am skinflint enough to have to do it because I wont spend out for new expensive kit that does it out of the box! I need a lottery win...

Evilpaul · 14 Jul 2020 at 11:47

Transmission can be configured with a watch directory. If that is shared then you can drop torrent files into that share and Transmission will pick them up and start download automatically. There is also a web interface for adding links manually to transmission.
For improved usability then there are several browser extensions that mean just clicking links start the downloads in Transmission on your remote NAS.

[GSV]Lemming · 14 Jul 2020 at 13:15

Those options sounds great, more than I was expecting for sure, thanks for the heads up.

Psycho Sonny · 20 Jul 2020 at 01:05

[GSV]Lemming said:
Those options sounds great, more than I was expecting for sure, thanks for the heads up.

You want an unraid server.

Which is basically any normal pc using unraid as the os.

You can then install hard drives of any size as you wish.

Install better gpu's for transcoding as you wish. I use a 1650 super as it has nvenc capability.

You also want to look into dockers like vpn deluge, jackett, sonarr, radarr and jellyfin.