hosted Plex + Amazon Cloud Drive + DVR + VPN works!

General Discussions
1

I’m sure I’m about to jinx something by sharing this, but what the hey, it’s exciting!
I’ve had this running stable for over 5 months and I couldn’t be happier.

My Plex box sits on a Kimsurfi dedicated server (cheaper brand of OVH). It’s a core i7 box with 16gb of ram. Plex is, essentially, all it does.

It’s connected to my two homes via site-to-site OpenVPN connections to a PFsense box on each end.

It also connects to a hosted PFsense instance I have for VPN and some other hosted servers.

On the Plex box, I was running out of HD space so I started looking into cloud options. Everything seemed cost-probhivitive until I found Amazon Cloud Drive and discovered that I had an unlimited plan already. Thanks Amazon!

I’m using ACD_CLI 0.3.2 and able to mount my ACD on my Plex box. It took about 24 hours to cp (because I didn’t know about the upload command) my /movies and /tv and /music. The Kimusfi boxes have a pretty fast connection and ACD supports about 200mbs too.

At my primary home, I’m on FiOS and get about 300/150 and have a backup Comcast pipe that’s 150/30.

I’m able to stream 20mbs 1080p with no problems. That means Plex is reading from ACD and streaming to me, over VPN, around my network and to my AppleTVs or iOS devices. I honestly cannot believe that works.

But wait, there’s more!

Two weeks ago I got an HDHomeRun Extend. I was sure I was going to have to build a local Plex box for the DVR function. But for giggles I tried manually adding the IP to the remote Plex box.

It actually works! I can record full HD, over a VPN, to a remote Plex box with the storage on ACD. I’m a little afraid to even reboot anything because I cannot believe there is enough steady bandwidth to make this all work. And yet, it does, reliably.

For connecting outside my network, I have port 32400 open on the remote hosted box - Plex connect works just fine. I can also VPN to my hosted master PFsense VPN server and connect that way.

I understand Plex have dropped their plans for a hosted account with an ACD backend. But for those interested in rolling there own, it seems to work pretty well.

What I’m not doing:

  • using EncFS and UnionFS as some others have done
  • using acd_cli’s upload function
1 Like
2

Glad to see you’re having good luck with this setup. I have a ton of encfs encrypted data at ACD and I’m looking into OVH among other providers. What’s the max amount of streams you’ve had thus far?

3

Thanks for your post, your feedbakc is very valuable !

I have more or less the same configuration (VPS Kimsufi + ACD), and two questions :

  • Don’t you have some issues with “acd_cli sync” ? I randomly lose the mounting point.
  • How exactly did you uploaded your data to ACD ? With a simple “cp” command ?

Thanks !

4

You could also mount the ACD using rclone, which would have the advantage of encrypting the content. I do this with Google Drive