Yup, I jumped on the bandwagon recently and setup sickbeard and sabnzbd on my Ubuntu NAS box. Sickbeard and sabnzbd and it’s direct integration with Plex are really the most awesome thing since Subsonic that could have happened to my server. Really. It’s amazing. Trust me.
The whole thing took me a few hours (all told) to setup partly because it involves spending my hard-earned cash on certain services and partly because I was bouncing around different sites trying to compile the steps I needed to go through to get it setup properly. I thought it might be helpful to send out a very quick, no-nonsense guide to getting it installed (but not configured – that’s the time consuming bit).
1. Install SabNZBd Plus
As of the writing of this article, it seems that sabnzbdplus is now part of the ubuntu 12.04 repositories. If you’re on an older version of ubuntu, you may have to go do some research and add a third-party repository. As for this guide, I’m going the easy route. Login to your server and type the following on the command lines:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sabnzbdplus
sudo apt-get install sabnzbdplus-theme-mobile
This is going to install a few packages and get SabNZBd Plus installed. Easy, right? Yup. Now go edit the configuration file:
sudo nano /etc/default/sabnzbdplus
Now you’ll need to edit the following:
Don’t use ROOT. Bad things may happen. Save and exit.
That’s it. Now go configure it at:
- http://your.server.ip.here:8080/sabnzbd
I recommend following Ainer’s excellent instructions here:
http://www.ainer.org/sabnzbd-install-setup-configuration-guide-for-ubuntu-linux-mint
2. Install Sick Beard
Open up a terminal window and execute the following commands. Make sure you navigate to your user directory of choice (i.e. /home/username) where you’d like to complete the install. Same user directory as used above in the Sabnzbd instructions.
wget https://github.com/midgetspy/Sick-Beard/tarball/master -O sickbeard.tar.gz
tar xf sickbeard.tar.gz
This will grab the latest Sick Beard package from the internets. Then it will unpack the contents of the package to a directory names something like “midgetspy-Sick-Beard-xxxxxxx”.
Now we need to move that into it’s install directory.
mv midgetspy-Sick-Beard-xxxxxxx .sickbeard
sudo mv .sickbeard/init.ubuntu /etc/init.d/sickbeard
sudo gedit /etc/init.d/sickbeard
From here on out you’ll want to configure Sick Beard to work with sabnzbd, setup TV shows to download, etc. Once again, head over to Ainer’s site to get started:
http://www.ainer.org/sick-beard-install-setup-configuration-guide-for-ubuntu-linux-mint/3
Shout-Outs
Thanks to Ainer.org for their detailed instructions. Without these I’d never have gotten this going… or it would have taken me twice as much time. Of course, the developers of both Sickbeard and Sabnzbd – please consider donating to them – they make amazing software. Plex, which I cannot praise enough, is also amazing. I hope they keep providing Linux based server software for us folks using Plex + Roku.
Also when setting this up you may be considering which news servers to use and which search services. I personally picked up an account with newshosting for news servers because it was a relatively cheap monthly cost (there are deals out there if you search). For the search service, I went with NZB Matrix which is a onetime fee for life. In retrospect, you probably don’t need to add a search service, but it definitely helps improve your likelihood of finding NZBs.
Disclaimer
I’ve posted these instructions here for educational purposes only. Of course downloading copyrighted content is a no-no in most countries so please don’t break the law.
Enjoy!
It is my pleasure to announce the arrival of my new tech blog (http://parmeter.net/tech) which I am unveiling right… now!
