This post guides you through the installation of Deluge and Autobrr on a TrueNAS Scale storage appliance.

Motivation

Feel free to skip this section and go straight to the installation instructions.

My motivation for running these apps is to add another node to the swarm archiving the sciop.net scientific document collection. Since I have a TrueNAS appliance always connected to the Internet, I figured running a torrent agent on it will offer a low-maintenance way to use the attached storage to support this effort.

SciOP groups torrents into various collections, and each collection is published as an RSS feed. The use of RSS to feed BitTorrent clients is normally a tool for publishing episodic video. Because of that common use case, some RSS torrent clients (like Sonarr) require that the feed have publication dates, to filter and prioritize episodes to download. The SciOP feeds are static catalogs of documents without publication date fields, so such clients won’t work with them. Autobrr does.

The TrueNAS Scale OS offers certain ready-made Docker images in their “app store” that offer configuration interfaces that can be manipulated through their web UI. Both Deluge and Autobrr are available there, so I chose them for the simplest and most maintainable installation.

OK, on with the installation.

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• #howto

“Fairness” and “justice” are not the same thing.

Fairness has to do with playing according to the rules—someone wins a game “fair and square”—without considering whether the rules themselves are just.

Fairness in a game that is rigged is still unjust. Insisting on “fair admissions” for people whose families have vastly different histories of privilege or oppression is unjust. Insisting on “fair taxation” is meaningless without a larger, justice-driven goal of reducing wealth inequality. After all, it’s perfectly fair for a bilionaire to shield their wealth; they’re playing the game as written.

Striving for justice often initially upsets people who focus on fairness, because justice often demands breaking long-standing tradition. But justice is what moves societies toward enlightenment; fairness only keeps it firmly in the past.

• #opinion

Do not rush software development.

Not even when a deadline approaches. Especially not when a deadline approaches.

Strive for consistent, persistent progress, not bursts of emergency-driven coding. When a deadline looms ahead, let it wash over you. The time to deal with that deadline lies in the past, when you still had many levers to pull. The closer you get closer to GM day, the fewer choices you get, and the more you simply have to execute the plan, however poor it looks.

Whatever you decide to do to meet a deadline, do it in a calm, deliberate manner. Don’t rush, don’t scramble, don’t cut corners. If you have to take on technical debt to meet the date, discuss it with your team and ensure buy-in. If you have to work longer hours, do it knowing exactly how much extra you’re putting in, when you will stop doing it, and what you realistically expect to get from the exercise. The return on overwork is not as great as you think.

Hitting a deadline is a shared responsibility, but it’s not shared in equal proportion. Many signals are available to project managers and program managers along the way to understand the risks of a project. The team’s ability to not miss a deadline is greatest at the beginning of the project, and smallest near the end. Therefore, short of gross negligence or sabotage, the responsibility to deliver a project on time lies on those who define and manage it, not the people who actually implement the product.

Also, all deadlines are made up.

• #FridayDevAdvice

I think one of the most important axioms that one must internalize in order to navigate the world with thoughtfulness and rationality is that there is such a thing as a shared, objective truth.

The shared assumption that naturally occurring, observable, measurable, reportable, and verifiable facts actually exist and can be communally homed into despite one’s bias, perspective, or imperfect observation is the absolute bedrock of science; but it must also drive our civic discourse if rationality is to survive.

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• #opinion

Psst, hey: hackers are not tech bros. The vast majority of hackers never become tech bros. The ethics of hacking runs completely counter to that of tech bros.

Hackers make hardware do things they weren’t intended to do. They circumvent barriers. They string together contraptions that repurpose old stuff to do new things. Hackers aren’t that interested in money; they’re more interested in showing off their skills. They love to learn and make demos and create and share free tech that other hackers then build upon. All they want is acknoweledgement and the respect of their peers.

Tech bros are parasites. They’re greedy bastards who love to erect barriers between people and tech. They extract, addict, monetize. They turn everything fun and useful into a transaction, a dopamine trap, a subscription, a surveillance tool, an advertising outlet, and a vector to extract money from labor and suppliers.

Please don’t get them mixed up.

• #opinion