Pi-hole, Conditional Forwarding, and Unifi Networking

In my start of the year post, I had given up with attempting to get Pi-hole to work as a DHCP server while in a docker container and had started using “isc-dhcp-server”. The main driver to having Pi-hole performing DHCP was so that in the dashboard I could see actual hostnames as opposed to the IP addresses of the clients. Instead of persevering with trying to get DHCP working in the Pi-hole container, I took advantage of changes I was making in my home network setup.

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Docker and Locales

Since I rebuilt my server I have been seeing issues where my use of the transcode-video docker image would consistently fail to complete the encoding process with this error.

transcode-video: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII

The linked post led me to the solution - I needed to update the Dockerfile for my version of the image to include additional commands to configure the locale. This was a pretty easy addition as I already was using my own to customise a couple of things. I do not know why the appeared, but all I really care about is that it is working again now.

FROM ntodd/video-transcoding
  
# Configure locale
RUN locale-gen en_GB.UTF-8
ENV LANG en_GB.UTF-8
ENV LANGUAGE en_GB:en
ENV LC_ALL en_GB.UTF-8

Plex DVR on Docker with the Official Xbox One Digital TV Tuner

In the last part of this series we got the Official Xbox One TV Tuner working successfully with Plex on a beta version of Fedora 28.

Last weekend one part of the RAID-1 boot drive array I used for my media server failed, so I took the opportunity to give Fedora 28 a shot as my boot OS with the replacement drive as opposed to imediately repairing the RAID. If this didn’t work out I can still swap some drives around and let the RAID resync. This may still happen, as Fedora is not offically supported on the HP Microserver I run, so I miss out on some of the agents used by the Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) server management interface to report back machine metrics.

As part of this switch I am re-evaluating what I can use Docker for, and so have OS distribution agnostic, scripted, services. Even if I do choose to switch back to CentOS this will not be a waste as there were some software packages which I was already compiling from source due to a lack of availability in CentOS repositories. When Ubuntu move to the 4.16 kernel I will likely switch again, but should have an easier time as I can re-use the configured Docker containers I have already scripted.

So it is now time to get Plex working on Docker with this tuner.

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Plex DVR with the Official Xbox One Digital TV Tuner - The Direct (and working!) Approach

With the recent release of version 4.16 of the linux kernel, the drivers needed to use the Xbox One Tuner are now distributed with the kernel.

At the time of writing, the only mainstream distribution using this version of the kernel is the Fedora 28 beta (due for mainstream release early May).

With this driver now part of the kernel, Plex appears to recognise the tuner as a community supported tuner and functions correctly using it directly. We still need to download and install the “dvb-demod-mn88472-02.fw” firmware file however as without this, while the tuner will be recognised in Plex, scanning for channels will always return zero results.

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