Good day, everyone. I took the plunge into self-hosting in the last couple of weeks and set up a server running Linux Mint. I installed the media streaming stack composed of Jellyfin, Jellyseerr, Radarr, Sonarr, Jackett, Bazarr and Transmission according to this excellent guide: https://zerodya.net/self-host-jellyfin-media-streaming-stack/
Before installing it on my server, I tested it on my Linux Mint laptop and it worked perfectly. I also run NordVPN and had no issues running the streaming stack with my VPN running on the laptop. I then installed it on my server (running the exact same version of Linux Mint) and it runs fine UNTIL I turn on my VPN and then I get an “Internal Server Error 500” from Jellyseerr. Jellyseerr is still able to list the requests I’ve made, but can’t display the Discover sections that list popular movies and shows unless I turn off the VPN.
The one difference between my successful laptop test setup and my final server setup is that I’m also running Pi-Hole on my server, so perhaps the problem is related to that? I installed the Pi-Hole using the official Ubuntu installer on the Pi-Hole website.
Anyway, I’m new to self-hosting so I’m not sure if I’ve provided the necessary details. Any help getting this setup to work with my VPN is greatly appreciated.
I’d put my money on asymetric network routing due to the VPN trying to route packages into the tunnel that should probably go to your LAN. A simple workaround, if you are unfamiliar with how to investigate and fix this, would be to put stuff that is supposed to go through the VPN into a virtual machine and have it download things to a shared folder that you can then stream from. Cuts out a whole bunch of problems.
Thank you for this. It got me to look up asymmetric network routing :)
During troubleshooting, I realized that it wasn’t just Jellyseerr that was being blocked, but all kinds of processes. I managed to get the system working by whitelisting my local network within my VPN. I’ve never had to do that before, so it probably indicates some other problem. I’ll look into virtual machines next!