
A few years ago, I set up a local [Plex Media Server](https://www.plex.tv/) on my Raspberry Pi. It works like Netflix but with my local media files that are stored on an external hard drive. It saves the progress of watched files and provides additional information to the files, like episode descriptions.

My Raspberry Pi is running 24/7, and therefore all my files are always accessible from all my devices on my home network. Plex provides apps for all different kinds of devices, e.g., Android, Windows, and FireTV Stick.

# Requirements
* Raspberry Pi
* SD Card 16GB
* LAN Cable or Wireless LAN Adapter
* External Hard Drive

**Raspberry Pi** I would recommend a Raspberry Pi with Gigabit Ethernet and USB 3.0. I am using the [Raspberry Pi 4 B](https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/).

**SD Card 16GB** Your Raspberry Pi needs an SD Card with an operating system installed. I am using Ubuntu Server.

**LAN Cable or Wireless LAN Adapter** Of course, we need access to the server. This can be achieved with a LAN Cable or a Wireless LAN Adapter for the Raspberry. I would recommend using a LAN Cable and connecting your Raspberry Pi directly to your router.

**External Hard Drive** We need a place where we store our media files. An external hard drive with enough space and USB 3.0 will work fine. You can use whatever you want or what you have in reach. I am using a [Western Digital My Book 3TB with USB 3.0](https://www.amazon.com/Wd-Mybook-Essential-3tb-Black/dp/B00FANPAPW). I should replace it soon because it is already eight years old.

# Setup
The following step-by-step guide shows you how to install the Plex Media Server and a Samba share on your Raspberry Pi. The Samba share is needed to easily drop files on your raspberry from all your devices in your home network. 

Before we start with the installation, we should update the package list and all our packages by running the following commands:

    sudo apt update
    sudo apt upgrade

This might take a while.

## Install Samba Share

Samba is a tool that allows us to easily share files with SMB/CIFS clients. It is quickly installed and set up. 

### Install
Now let's install samba with the following command:

    sudo apt install samba samba-common-bin -y

### Mount Drive

We can now configure the share on our Raspberry Pi. We need to connect the external hard drive and mount it. First, we create a new folder that we will share. 

This can be done with the following command:

    mkdir /media/share

- - -

To mount our external hard drive, we need to get its name with the following command:

    lsblk

 | ![Blog-Image: lsblk output](/img/blogs/plex/lsblk.png) |
 | :--: |
 | **Output of command lsblk** |

- - -

Now we can mount the drive manually with the following command:

    sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/sda1 /media/share

**-t ext4** The filesystem type. Ext4 is a popular Linux filesystem\
**/dev/sda1/** The drive name\
**/media/share** The mount point

If that step is successful, we can mount the drive permanently by adding the following line to the file /etc/fstab:

    /dev/sda1 /media/share auto noatime 0 0

Now the disk should get mounted automatically after each system reboot.

**auto** The filesystem will be mounted automatically at startup\
**noatime** Disables writing file access times every time you read a file\
**0** Is the file system backed up: **0** - no, **1** - yes\
**0** Disable the filesystem check

For more information about the parameters, see [fstab](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab). 


### Samba Configuration

Now we need to adapt the samba config to share this folder. The config file is located at **/etc/samba/smb.conf** and can be adapted with any text editor we like, e.g., VIM.

Following needs to be added to the bottom of the file:

    [share]
    path = /media/share
    writeable = Yes
    create mask = 0644
    directory mask = 0755
    public = no

**[share]** is the name of our share. It is used when connecting to the share.\
**path = /media/share** is the location of the shared directory.\
**writeable = Yes** allows us to write data to the share.\
**create mask = 0644** defines the file permissions.\
**directory mask = 0755** defines the folder permissions.\
**public = no** requires a valid user to connect to the share.

- - -

The next step is to create a user for the share with a password of our choice:

    sudo smbpasswd -a pi

### Restart

The final step is to restart the Samba share:

    sudo systemctl restart smbd

Now we should be able to connect to our share.

## Connect to your Samba Share from Windows

From a Windows PC, you can connect to the network share with the following command:

    net use Z: \\<plex-server-ip>\share /USER:\myUserName myPassword

This will map the share to the drive letter Z, and you should see the share in Windows Explorer. Now you can easily move files to the share, which can then be streamed with Plex.

## Install Plex Media Server

Plex is a tool that is used to stream media files. Plex provides clients for all different devices, e.g., Android, Windows, etc. 

### Add Plex Media Server repository

We need to add the [Plex APT](https://support.plex.tv/articles/235974187-enable-repository-updating-for-supported-linux-server-distributions/) repository to our system. This can be done with the following command:

echo deb https://downloads.plex.tv/repo/deb public main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plexmediaserver.list

Import the [GPG](https://www.gnupg.org/) key with the following commands:

wget https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-keys/PlexSign.key
cat  PlexSign.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/PlexSigkey.gpg

Let's update the package index again:

    sudo apt update

### Install Plex Media Server

Now that we have Plex in our package list, we can install it with the following command:

    sudo apt install plexmediaserver -y

### Check Status

After the installation, the Plex Media Server runs automatically. We just need to check its status with the following command:

    systemctl status plexmediaserver.service

 | ![Blog-Image: Plex status](/img/blogs/plex/plex-status.png) |
 |:--:|
 |**Plex Service Status**|

### Configure Plex Media Server

We want Plex Media Server to start automatically on system boot. This can be achieved with the following command:

    sudo systemctl enable plexmediaserver.service

You can now connect to your Plex Media Server and configure it to your liking. Open [http://<plex-server-ip>:32400/web](http://<plex-server-ip>:32400/web) in your browser. You will need to create a free account and can then log in to your Plex Media Server. 

Congratulations, you now have a self-made home NAS with a local Plex Media Server. Have fun watching!

Samba Home NAS with Media Server like Netflix for local files on a Raspberry Pi.

A Local Netflix - Plex Media Server


This is something that happened to me recently. I was working on my private projects and was playing around with different Amazon Web Services. I had one service deployed on [Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)](https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/). One morning when I woke up and looked at my phone, I was shocked. I got about ten budget warnings per mail! My budget was exceeded during the night.

## So, what happened? 
When I first deployed my Spring Boot service on ECS, it was not working. Therefore, I enabled [CloudWatch](https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/) Logs in my ECS Cluster to be able to debug the problems during startup. 

In the end, the service was in a redeploy loop because the health check grace period was too low. Whenever the service was deployed, the Application Load Balancer almost immediately started to perform its health checks. The service did not answer with a successful response because it was still in the startup process. Therefore, the status of the service was set to unhealthy. The consequence of this was that the service got undeployed, and a new service got deployed.

I did not disable CloudWatch logs because we get the first 5GB of log ingestion for free, and it might help with upcoming issues.
5GB of logs for one service is a lot, right?
Yes, indeed. But not in my case. I had a bug in my service that resulted in an endless loop that would log the same exception over and over again.
This resulted in **238GB** of useless logs! The costs are **159.79$** for literally nothing. 

I logged in to my AWS Account and immediately stopped the service. Then I looked at the logs and recognized what was wrong. I deleted the logs and fixed the bug.
It was just one line that was wrong. It had been added just before going to bed the day before.

With a faster instance on ECS, this could have gotten much worse! I was using a Fargate Spot instance with 0.5vCPUs. I can't imagine how many GBs could have been created with a stronger instance.

## How to prevent this?
Don't commit and deploy stuff and go to bed or leave the office. Do you have static code analysis and automated tests? Are you confident that the upgrade works just fine? It would be best if you take the time to verify it manually. Look at the logs manually if you don't have an automated log analysis. In my case, just 5 minutes of my time could have saved me 159.79$ and a stressful morning.

Always make sure to stay within your free tier limit of all AWS services if you don't want to get high expenses. Unfortunately, there is no cost limit in AWS.
You can and should create budgets with alerts. This does not prevent the cost explosion, but it might help react in a reasonable time and keep the costs to a minimum.
Details about **AWS Budgets** can be found [here](https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-budgets/).

It is also recommended to enable **AWS Cost Anomaly Detection** and create a cost monitor. It will notify you about any detected cost anomalies that exceed the configured threshold.
Details about AWS Cost Anomaly Detection and how to create a cost monitor can be found [here](https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-cost-anomaly-detection/).

Another helpful measure could be CloudWatch itself. You can create **Billing Alarms** that notify you when your estimated charges exceed some configured threshold. 
A step-by-step guide on how to create a billing alarm using CloudWatch can be found [here](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/monitor_estimated_charges_with_cloudwatch.html#creating_billing_alarm_with_wizard).

Note that all those measures do not stop any services. They just notify you, and you need to manually fix the problem or stop the service that incurs the charges.

## Lessons learned
I learned the hard way that I was too confident when deploying small changes.
> Trust is good control is better - *Vladimir Lenin*

In the future, I am going to verify manually that all my automated checks are working correctly and there are no obvious issues with the deployment. I also disabled CloudWatch log ingestion in my ECS Cluster for now. 

I had no Billing Alarms configured, and my cost monitor was not configured correctly. I have updated everything, and next time I should get notified much earlier.

**Update 29.06.2022:** Amazon refunded the charges for CloudWatch after I reached out to them and explained the situation. The support was excellent.

Unexpected costs of AWS CloudWatch. How to set up cost alerts and budgets in AWS.

AWS CloudWatch Cost Explosion

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Hi! I am Andreas.

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A Local Netflix - Plex Media Server

AWS CloudWatch Cost Explosion

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