So I recently set up a home media server and was planning on setting up remote access using Tailscale which doesn’t work very well with VPN’s from what I have read.
I don’t want to download things exposing my IP address so was thinking about picking up a Raspberry PI and running Radarr & Sonarr, then setting the PI to auto transfer to my server every 24 hours with any new files.
I’ve never used a Raspberry Pi before so wasn’t sure if the Zero would be powerful enough to do this. It’d literally just be used to connect to a VPN, Download and transfer files on my network.
Would the Pi Zero be suitable or is there a better Pi for this use case?
A Zero would probably be way underpowered for the job. I’ve used a Pi 4 in the past and it worked ok, but choked occasionally.
My actual recommendation would be a small x86 box, something like a Lenovo Thinkcentre Tiny. You can get them used for about the price of a Pi, and they’ll be much more reliable.
Sonarr and Radarr are essentially tailored webpages. You will probably not get both running on one Pi Zero W nicely, due to ram constraints (A Pi Zero 2W would be okay). However One of those apps on a Pi Zero W would be fine, but given enough swap its possible that both would run (albeit slowish, but who cares? its automated so you don’t have to! Doesn’t matter if the “grab” takes a couple more seconds than normally)
There would be a couple of things to note, firstly a slim starting distro, and remove stuff unnecessary. Secondly, you would go the nginx route rather than Apache2 since it is far more lightweight and less RAM overhead. Finally make sure you have a swap area on your memory (preferably not on SD, but you have little choice) The OS (assuming Debian or whatever) will be able to swap out other processes when memory gets low for the active process.
Finally, transfer would be fine using wifi, alongside the browsing data but this is likely to stutter on occasions when you are browsing whilst it is transferring an NZB etc to nzbget or whatever your dldr is. (NZB’s these days can be quite large, especially for a 60GB BR rip type grab.) For torrents you’d probably not notice.
The PI Zero 2 W, is essentially a RPi3b with less ram but with multicores, so it would be more competent (due to being about to switch out to swap faster/more efficiently). But there is no reason why Pi Zero W could not run one of those apps (maybe both, depending on the local db sizes). After all, they are only single threaded anyway, its just how the OS works with them.
(Most of the posts in this thread obviously have little to no knowledge of how Linux works, or the capabilities of the hardware.)
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