This is my configuration that works for me the best for my use case of an all in one media server. This is not meant to be a tutorial by any means as it does require some knowledge to get setup. I'm happy to help out as best as I can and welcome any updates/fixes/pulls to make it better and more helpful to others.

• Verizon Gigabit FIOS
• Google Drive with an Encrypted Media Folder
• Arch Linux
• Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz
• 32 GB of Memory
• 250 GB SSD Storage for my root
• 6TB mirrored for staging

I use Sonarr and Radarr in conjuction with NZBGet and ruTorrent/rtorrent to get my media. My normal flow is that they grab a file, download it and place it in /gmedia under the correct spot of /gmedia/TV /gmedia/Movies respectively and that is local underneath the covers. Each night, a rclone upload scripts moves from local to my Google Drive. To acheive that, I use rclone to mount my Google Drive and mergerfs to combine a local disk and Google Drive together to provide a single access point for all services.

The installation has shifted to Arch Linux as I changed from Debian over to that with the first step installing yay as my AUR helper. These steps are all done as a non root user.

$ sudo pacman -S git
$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
$ cd yay
$ makepkg -si

Once yay is installed, I use that for all my installations.

$ yay -S fuse

You need to make the change to /etc/fuse.conf to allow_other by uncommenting the last line by and remove the # from the last line.

sudo vi /etc/fuse.conf
root@gemini:~# cat /etc/fuse.conf
# /etc/fuse.conf - Configuration file for Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE)

# Set the maximum number of FUSE mounts allowed to non-root users.
# The default is 1000.
#mount_max = 1000

# Allow non-root users to specify the allow_other or allow_root mount options.
user_allow_other

After fuse is installed, I install mergerfs as it's already part of the repositories for Arch Linux.

$ yay -S mergerfs

My use case for mergerfs is that I always want to write to the local disk first and all my applications (Sonarr/Radarr/rTorrent/Plex/Emby/etc) all point directly to /gmedia. For them it's not relevant if the file is local or remote as they should act the same.

/gmedia
    /data/local (local mirror disk)
    /GD (rclone mount)

My rclone.conf has an entry for the Google Drive connection and and encrypted folder in my Google Drive called "media". I mount media with rclone script to display the decrypted contents to my server.

My rclone looks like: rclone.conf

My mount settings and why I use them:

# This is the standar mount with the remote and the mount point location
/usr/bin/rclone mount gcrypt: /GD \
# This allows other users than the one mounting it to access the data
# and needs to be used in conjunction with the /etc/fuse.conf config earlier
--allow-other \
# This is the time I want to store the directory and file structure in memory.
# It will invalidate it if changes are detected so bigger the better
--dir-cache-time 96h \
# This is set beacues of a few tests in terms of the sweet spot for uploading
# files as I do not upload on my mount normally.
--drive-chunk-size 32M \
# This shows the level level
--log-level INFO \
# This is where I write my log files to
--log-file /var/log/rclone.log \
# This helps with pausing and resuming on Plex. It can be larger but 1h seemed
# good for me
--timeout 1h \
# This sets the default umask so user / group / other have permissions like 775.
--umask 002 \
# This allows remote control and works with my other startup script that does
# a RC command to refresh / warm up the dir-cache
--rc

They all get mounted up via my systemd scripts as it goes in order of mounting my rclone, running a fine to warm up the cache and the mergerfs mount last.

My gmedia starts up items in order:

1. rclone mount This is the standard rclone mount.
2. mergerfs mount This needs to be named the same as the mount point for the mount to work properly. I use /gmedia so the file is named accordingly.
3. find command which justs caches the directory and file structure and provides me an output of the structure. This is not required but something I choose to do to warm up the cache. This fires and forgets as it takes ~30 seconds so I don't wait for it to complete.

This is located over here if you want to request help or compile from source mergerfs@github

I found unionfs to not do what I wanted and I can't stand the hidden files so for my, it's much easier to configure and use mergerfs.

The following options make it always write to the first disk in the mount:

Options = defaults,sync_read,auto_cache,use_ino,allow_other,func.getattr=newest,category.action=all,category.create=ff

Important items:

• sync_read as rclone is default built with this and is required for proper streaming
• category.action=all,category.create=ff says to always create directories / files on the first listed mount point and for my configuration that is my /data/local
• if you are reading directly from your rclone mount, you do not need to worry about any of the mergerfs settings.

I moved my files to my GD every ngiht via a cron job and an upload cloud script. This leverages an excludes file which gets rid of partials and my torrent directory.

This is my cron entry:

# Cloud Upload
12 3 * * * /opt/rclone/scripts/upload_cloud

If you have a lot of directories and files, it might be helpful to increase the file watchers by adding this to your /etc/sysctl.conf and rebooting. I choose the number below as I wanted to have plenty of capacity over the default.

# Plex optimizations
fs.inotify.max_user_watches=262144

These tips and more for Linux can be found at the Plex Forum Linux Tips

I use Caddy to server majority of my things as I plug directly into Google Authentication oAuth to make life easier. I removed Caddy from my Plex configuration to remove one layer of complexity as it did not seem to be needed anymore.

My configuration is here

For all my private traffic, I use TorGuard as they support port forwarding and have very good support.

Setup and Configuration