Disclaimer: when in comes to TrueNAS and Unix/Linux I am a novice. I don't know much in the way of terminal commands, and I rely mostly on the TrueNAS GUI. So please be gentle.
So I recently decided to check out Sonarr. I had only a vague idea of what it was, but I tried installing the plugin from the TrueNAS GUI, and the experience has been... interesting. The issues I encountered are probably things that many novice users will have to deal with, so I decided to document my progress so far. (BTW, I'm running TrueNAS core version 12.0 U8.1, and I have installed Sonarr version 3.0.9.1549.)
First of all, Sonarr seems to be a very convenient app to keep track of TV series. However, I immediately ran into various functionality issues. It took three attempts to install the plugin. No idea that the issue was, but I had to manually delete the Sonarr jail and start from scratch. I got a lot of error messages on the installation progress window about permissions and stuff which I am sorry to say did not document (and I'm not about to destroy my working Sonarr installation to recreate them). However, after the third attempt and despite various cryptic (at least to me) error messages, Sonarr worked!
After I started exploring the Sonarr web interface, I ran into my first issue: the Indexers function didn't manage to connect to any of the default sites. After some research, I managed to find that the solution is to disable the Certificate Validation in the Settnings->General->Security. From what I gather, this is a widely known issue. So it would be nice if Certificate Validation was disabled by default, or at least there was a post-install note in the TrueNAS plugin (other plugins have such notes) which would alert an unsuspecting novice user about this issue.
Then I discovered that Sonarr would not allow me to define a root folder for storing downloads. When I opened a select folder dialog, it would be completely empty with no directories listed and obviously I could not navigate to any directory. This took more hours of research, but I finally figured out that Sonarr did not have the necessary permissions to access its own jail filesystem. The solution is to go to the TrueNAS Jails settings section, select the Sonarr jail and click on the Shell button to access the jail command line. Then in the command line you should elevate the Sonarr user account to access the file system with the following command:
This will add the Sonarr user account to the wheel admin group, which has read-write access to the filesystem. It's not elegant but it's fast and relatively easy for a novice user. I don't know if this Sonarr permissions issue is wide-spread or only happened to me because of the plugin installation errors I encountered. Note: I had to restart the Sonarr jail after the change for it to work.
Then I tried to connect Sonarr to a download client. I chose Transmission because I used it on my Mac and I know the interface. Also, it seemed simple and I did not need something too complex like qBittorrent. So I installed the Transmission plugin without any issues. However, although Transmission is working fine in its own jail, it refuses to allow Sonarr to connect to it (I get a 409 error). I dedicated many hours looking for a solution, but the closest I got was a thread that suggested re-compiling the source code of Transmission which is way beyond my difficulty level.
So for the time being, Sonarr cannot use Transmission to download media. If anyone has any suggestions on how to make Sonnar talk to Transmission, please reply below. I will try installing the TrueNAS qBittorrent plugin and see if I have better luck.
To be continued...
So I recently decided to check out Sonarr. I had only a vague idea of what it was, but I tried installing the plugin from the TrueNAS GUI, and the experience has been... interesting. The issues I encountered are probably things that many novice users will have to deal with, so I decided to document my progress so far. (BTW, I'm running TrueNAS core version 12.0 U8.1, and I have installed Sonarr version 3.0.9.1549.)
First of all, Sonarr seems to be a very convenient app to keep track of TV series. However, I immediately ran into various functionality issues. It took three attempts to install the plugin. No idea that the issue was, but I had to manually delete the Sonarr jail and start from scratch. I got a lot of error messages on the installation progress window about permissions and stuff which I am sorry to say did not document (and I'm not about to destroy my working Sonarr installation to recreate them). However, after the third attempt and despite various cryptic (at least to me) error messages, Sonarr worked!
After I started exploring the Sonarr web interface, I ran into my first issue: the Indexers function didn't manage to connect to any of the default sites. After some research, I managed to find that the solution is to disable the Certificate Validation in the Settnings->General->Security. From what I gather, this is a widely known issue. So it would be nice if Certificate Validation was disabled by default, or at least there was a post-install note in the TrueNAS plugin (other plugins have such notes) which would alert an unsuspecting novice user about this issue.
Then I discovered that Sonarr would not allow me to define a root folder for storing downloads. When I opened a select folder dialog, it would be completely empty with no directories listed and obviously I could not navigate to any directory. This took more hours of research, but I finally figured out that Sonarr did not have the necessary permissions to access its own jail filesystem. The solution is to go to the TrueNAS Jails settings section, select the Sonarr jail and click on the Shell button to access the jail command line. Then in the command line you should elevate the Sonarr user account to access the file system with the following command:
Code:
root@sonarr:~ # pw usermod sonarr -G wheel
This will add the Sonarr user account to the wheel admin group, which has read-write access to the filesystem. It's not elegant but it's fast and relatively easy for a novice user. I don't know if this Sonarr permissions issue is wide-spread or only happened to me because of the plugin installation errors I encountered. Note: I had to restart the Sonarr jail after the change for it to work.
Then I tried to connect Sonarr to a download client. I chose Transmission because I used it on my Mac and I know the interface. Also, it seemed simple and I did not need something too complex like qBittorrent. So I installed the Transmission plugin without any issues. However, although Transmission is working fine in its own jail, it refuses to allow Sonarr to connect to it (I get a 409 error). I dedicated many hours looking for a solution, but the closest I got was a thread that suggested re-compiling the source code of Transmission which is way beyond my difficulty level.
So for the time being, Sonarr cannot use Transmission to download media. If anyone has any suggestions on how to make Sonnar talk to Transmission, please reply below. I will try installing the TrueNAS qBittorrent plugin and see if I have better luck.
To be continued...
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