Extending your homebrew NAS

Today, courtesy of @pedrovanzella, I was introduced to CouchPotato, a little project started by a dev from the SABnzbd+ forums. What it does, is magic.

Well, in reality it’s a bit less than that. If you’ve been following closely, you know that I have a little homebrew NAS that I’ve built from the ground up to take the hassle out of downloading new TV episodes.

To accomplish that, we used a piece of software called Sick Beard. It handles the schedules of TV shows in the country of origin and downloads the files whenever they are made available, in the resolution you specify.

Now this is all fine and dandy, except Sick Beard is of no use if you are interested in Movies.

Enter CouchPotato. It basically does exactly the same stuff that Sick Beard does, except it’s, well, made for Movie downloading.

One of the many cool features it has is the Greasemonkey script that lets you add Movies to your SABnzbd+ queue simply by visiting their respective IMDB page and clicking ‘Add to CouchPotato’.

It’s also written in Python, which makes it somewhat fast and easy to deploy. If you have Sick Beard installed already, go get CouchPotato now.

And thank me later. Or not. ;)

The Big Little NAS, Pt 2

If you missed part 1, go here.

Broadcatching ?

When I started building the server, I was (and still am) a fan of torrents. Using sites like ezrss.it, I could then automate the downloading of torrents with a simple RSS downloader script. Then I’d set up watch folders in rTorrent and it would take care of downloading and notifying me when complete.

That is, until I was told about Usenet.

Usenet, for the uninformed, is one of the oldest systems available on the Internet. Also know as user groups or discussion groups, Usenet servers store (up to a certain limit, called retention) messages posted by users who connect to them using specific software. You can get a feel for Usenet by using Google Groups, although technically Google’s implementation is a little different and doesn’t store binary files.

Now, due to post size limitations, these binary files need to be split into smaller chunks. And to prevent a lot of grief, each collection of posts containing chunks of a bigger file also contain a PAR file, which holds parity information to ensure that when all chunks are stitched together no bit is missing. It’s like a photo ID for the file.

You can download and stitch the files together, then check the parity of the file against the PAR file, but that’s a laborious process that can take a long chunk of your time for each download, so the best way here is to automate this process.

Enter SABnzbd+. The name may not make much sense, but this is the BEST way to automate downloads. There are plenty of docs on how to set it up on all different machines, but for Ubuntu all you need is follow this guide.

I’ll give you some time to get your head around SABnzbd+. Go on. I’ll wait.

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The Big Little NAS, Pt 1

Preface

This article/howto/recipe/whatever was inspired by a bunch of things:

• Me constantly running out of space for my media library.
• Me starting to use Apple’s Time Machine a lot.
• Drobo’s offerings.
• My desire to have a home server that could handle all the data I could throw at it, and then some, while also doing some automated tasks like downloading TV torrents files from Usenet and acting as my SSH tunnel, when needed.

Note: all prices are in NZD, unless otherwise stated.

UPDATE #1: Pictures are available here.

UPDATE #2: I’ve found a more up-to-date Netatalk guide here. For Ubuntu 9.10 or later. I’ve also had issues with ACPI using the factory BIOS of my motherboard. Luckily Intel had already posted an update for it, and it can be found here.

UPDATE #3: I’ve upgraded it without a hitch to Ubuntu 10.04. And it should stay this way for a while, since it’s an LTS release (Long Term Support).

UPDATE #4: Second part is now available here.

Feeling adventurous? Keep reading…

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