Managing Mediaserver and contents propelry, How?

 Thanks Jeremy,

I should not have been surprise about landing page, silly me, but it have been a long time since I worked with web development and my background is in Windows dev. not Linux I know off PHP but never used it myself. I can read most code regardless of origin but not to hot in writing it outside of nice IDE GUI.  but the index page look preaty simple to me. will try yo edit when the time comes.

Now for the fun part :-)

I guess my real questions in a nutshell would be:

#1. not "Can I install more software on the appliance" since it is basic Debian distro after all, but "Should I"

I am having issues with permissions when I separate the VMs. 

I have a fully functioning OpenFLEXR VM on the server, at least I think it all up and running etc.  but when I try to configure and run some scripts on mapped shares I get errors and can not create/delete folders or files. 

my thoughts are that if I install apps I want on the media server I will not have this issues as all will be run with the same user, in this case "emby" and with all permissions already setup and working.

Plus I really do not need ALL that OpenFLIXR has to offer, so why run extras. 

as for HOW-TOs, well I was asking about a more detailed information on the server itself not specific apps like emby and samba. more of can I upgrade the server to latest Debian? i.e. stretch?

how to do it and more importantly should I?

if devs move to later version of deb. how do I move with them?

what are the differences between Standard Debian setup and TurnKey setup?

I could have swear that I have seen Wiki pages with all that info before, but I can not find it today. so I ask if someone knows if this info still exists and where.

Sincerely VL

If you want to try resetting it, try running this from the commandline:

/usr/lib/inithooks/bin/emby-server.py --pass="NewPassword1"

Where NewPassword1 is your new password. Alternatively, you could leave off the `--pass=...` and it will run interactively.

As for adding links to the landing page, that is a basic php file which should be found at /var/www/index.php You should be able to edit that to add additional links.

As for installing additional software, if you keep in mind that TurnKey is based on Debian (v14.x = Debian Jessie/8) then you should be able to find plenty of info online.

Regarding your request for a how-to, what in particular are you looking to understand better? The Emby website may provide some help regarding Emby. The Windows filesharing is provided by Samba4, although by default, we provide a Samba3 style config. The Samba docs are fairly good IMO. TBH, I wouldn't consider myself an expert on any of that, but I do have it running at home myself, so may be able to give some pointers?

TBH, the best way to learn about Linux IMO is to play with it. So long as you have a backup (which you've confirmed is working) then don't hold back and have a play with stuff. If you document what you do as you go (and make more backups when you feel like you are having progress) then worst case scenario, you can restore a backup and you'll know what not to do next time! :)

Please feel free to share any insights you gain!

Per this stackexchange question you need to enable the follow symlinks and wide symlinks in the samba configuration.

As far as your question on installing other apps, fundamentally Turnkey is just Debian Linux, so it's perfectly acceptable to install other apps on the same appliance. You just have to deal with all of the setup and configuration of the new apps yourself. It's up to you whether it's worth the effort to do that vs running a separate appliance alongside it. My philosophy has been to run a separate appliance when the apps already are designed to be accessed via network, e.g. I have the mediaserver, fileserver, owncloud, and openldap appliances all running in separate VMs. I have installed additional apps to them when necessary, for instance I had Crashplan installed on the mediaserver and fileserver appliances to backup the large amount of user data that was stored on them.

If you're having permissions issues it may be that the linux user that is used to log-in via SAMBA is not in the appropriate group. I've dealt with most of those issues by putting all of my users that need access to  the share in one group and then forcing that group to be used in SAMBA with the "force group = <group name>", "force directory mode = 0060" and "force create mode = 0060" options on the share. This ensures that all users can read and write the files on the share.

Hope that helps.

just to add to my last post.

is there a way for me to use simlinks in /srv/storage that would point to my mount points in other folder?

I have MP into /mnt/<MyZfsDataPool>

now I want to simlink from storage to it.

 but when I do this the links are not visible from clients.

I can ssh into the server and I can see the links and use them in CLI

but they do not come up in my client when I connect to share.