Internal HDD - Share with Plex and Windows?

[myoung84]

Very new with Proxmox and need some help. Decided to try something new and convert my PC to a Proxmox server with the primary function of hosting plex.

I have Plex installed in an LXC container and is accessible on my network. I have successfully mapped my Qnap NAS to the Plex LXC. However, this is only for temporary use as I don't host Plex media on my NAS as there's not enough space. I have a single 8TB HDD installed in my Proxmox machine. I want to use this to store all of my media and need it accessible to Plex as well from my network. IE, I want to map it as a network drive on a separate win10 machine (not virtual). Also need to be able to have sonarr, radarr, etc access it from other containers (though I have not looked into sonarr, etc yet and will temporarliy run that on my win10 machine).

So where do I start? I have the drive in the machine and it shows up as my 8TB HDD /dev/sda. Not initialized or mapped or anything. Do I want NFS, ZFS, SMB? Really confused lol.

Do I need to install something like FreeNAS in a VM?

Moving to a new house in a couple of weeks and trying to get this working before I go. I currently have Plex set up on a temporary windows machine.

Specs if it helps:
i7-8700, 32GB Ram, No GPU, 500G nvme for Proxmox install, 500G SSD for Containers/VM, 8TB HDD for Plex Media.

 

[leesteken]

I think I answered a very similar question (how to access a disk in a container) in this thread. No need for FreeNAS, VMs, NFS or SMB.
Partition the disk, format the partition, mount the partition on a directory on the Proxmox host, use a mountpoint in the container to have access to that directory.
There are some links (to Linux command documentation) in the thread I mentioned. I hope this gets you started.

 

[myoung84]

I think I answered a very similar question (how to access a disk in a container) in this thread. No need for FreeNAS, VMs, NFS or SMB.
Partition the disk, format the partition, mount the partition on a directory on the Proxmox host, use a mountpoint in the container to have access to that directory.
There are some links (to Linux command documentation) in the thread I mentioned. I hope this gets you started.

I'll likely have more questions but that overall makes sense.

Should I create the disk partition with LVM or ZFS?

 

[leesteken]

I'll likely have more questions but that overall makes sense.

Should I create the disk partition with LVM or ZFS?

If you just want simple partition for the whole drive, I would partition a drive with gdisk. If you want only one partition, you could just use the whole drive without partitioning (maybe that's easier?). You could use LVM on the disk so you can more easily create (thin) virtual disks (like partitions) and resize them. Or you could use ZFS which can contain both filesystems and (thin) virtual disks. It depends on your (expected and possible future) use cases.
Partitioning and creating filesystems is a common operating system thing. I assume there are several guides on the internet about creating a Linux filesystem. Just make sure to use the right drive and not overwrite your existing drives and filesystems.

 

[manuelkamp]

I have Plex as container, and the Data disk is a mp (ext4, 10TB) from my big ZFS pool. The need to access it via Windows Clients came later, only for adding new Movies/Shows. So I decided to let the Plex CT be as optimized as it is and use SFTP as Windows Networkdrive. I have written a small How-To (but it is in German, but it may help anyways if you know a little about Linux by reading the commands):

<code>
===== SFTP Share vorbereiten =====

1) Neuen sftp-User anlegen
<code>adduser --shell /bin/false sftpusername</code>

2) Neuer sftp-User muss der Besitzergruppe des Zielordners angehören
<code>usermod -aG root sftpusername</code>

3) Config in **nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config** am Ende hinzufügen:
<code>Match User sftpusername
ForceCommand internal-sftp
PasswordAuthentication yes
ChrootDirectory %h
PermitTunnel no
AllowAgentForwarding no
AllowTcpForwarding no
X11Forwarding no</code>

4) Mountpoint im User-Homverzeichnis erstellen und Rechte festlegen
<code>mkdir /home/sftpusername/public
chown sftpusername:sftpusername /home/sftpusername/public

chown root:root /home/sftpusername
chmod 0755 /home/sftpusername</code>

5) Mounten des Zielordners in den Mountpoint
<code>mount --bind /mnt/share /home/sftpusername/public</code>

6) Verbindung prüfen (Login mit WinSCP und create/delete Datei)

7) Mount in **/etc/fstab** eintragen
<code>/mnt/share /home/sftpusername/public none bind 0 0</code>


===== Windows Client einrichten =====

1) Winfsp installieren (nur Core erforderlich)
{{ :winfsp-1.10.22006.msi | Download Winfsp 1.10.2206 }}

2) SSHFS Win installieren
{{ :sshfs-win-3.5.20357-x64.msi | Download SSHFS Win 3.5.20357 }}

3) Netzlaufwerk verbinden
<code>\\sshfs\plexsftpuser@srv-plex.kmpr.local</code>
</code>