From the inception of my home lab I’ve had a host called ‘nas.doma.in’, however it has always just had usb drives plugged in and ran the *arr stack and my media share apps locally on the host.
However, when I started looking into HW transcoding, I realised that I already had the hardware! I just had to now share my media from my nas, to be used inside docker, within a LXC, on mu nuc… which is a different host. (I also share Plex with friends and family, so no downtime preferably.
Setting up hardware transcoding was a bit of a challenge, but definitely doable. I wanted to run Plex in a Docker container inside an LXC (Linux Containers). This meant getting the integrated GPU (iGPU) to work within that setup.
After some research and a helpful forum thread, I managed to get the iGPU recognized inside the LXC container. From there, it was just a matter of mounting the device into the Emby container, setting the "right" permissions with chmod -R 777 /dev/dri, and restarting everything. Success! Hardware transcoding was up and running.
Sharing My Media Drives
Feeling confident after the hardware transcoding success, I moved on to sharing my media drives. I needed to share an 18TB and 4TB HDD along with a 2TB NVMe from my Pi to the LXC container and then to Plex.
Initially, I considered using SMB but decided against it. I had some experience with SFTP and knew it could be used as a share. However, setting up an FTP server inside a Docker container didn’t work as planned since Debian no longer supports mounting FTP servers as a file system.
This led me to explore NFS (Network File System). After some proper research, I set up an NFS server in Docker on my NAS. Next, I needed to mount these shares in the LXC container. I found that bind mounts were the way to go. Ensuring the NFS share was always mounted on the Proxmox host and then editing the LXC configuration did the trick.
Wrapping It Up
Two days later, my media was still being ingested, but everything was working smoothly.
In the end, the setup was quite straightforward. The journey to get there, though, was quite an adventure!
Thanks for reading, and happy streaming!