SABnzbd

[jokemeister]

If you are looking for an alternative to the DSM 4.0-2198 Download Station for downloading NZB's, I've created this topic for specific discussion on SABnzbd after recently going through the installation and setup myself.

SABnzbd looks to be a core piece of software that others are "packaging". Before you go ahead and install anything via the Package Center, you'll need to know what CPU is in your DS so you get the correct version.
Check here: http://forum.synology.com/wiki/index.php/What_kind_of_CPU_does_my_NAS_have.

I found 2 sources of SABnzbd packaged for the DS, those being:
Superzebulon here: http://synopkg.superzebulon.org/spkrepo/packages
and Mertymade here: http://www.mertymade.com/syno/

There's likely to be others so apologies if they got missed.

The installation will require you have already installed the prerequisite supporting packages. These packages are detailed on the respective web sites and are readily available either from their respective repositories or other site. Don't worry, the installation is quite painless.

I tried installing the Superzebulon package along with it's supporting packages first but was not able to get it running. The Superzebulon forum would suggest it's just a bug that'll be fixed soon enough but since I was keen to get SABnzbd up and running I ended up installing the Mertymade package instead. Please note that I'm not recommending one package over another, simply writing of my own experience. I do recommend you inform yourself of the features and possibly even try both to see what suits you best.

The mertymade package required I install Base Utils, Compression Utils and Python Utils before the SABnzbd+ package. All are available from the Mertymade repository listed above and installed/ran without a hitch.

Once the SABnzbd+ package is installed, you need to login as Admin and perform some basic setup via the SABnzbd+ Helper that's now in your DSM pop down menu. Once you've done that, fire up your browser of choice and login to the SABnzbd+ console using the URL syno_IP_address:9200 (unless you're using SSL or have configured a different port).

From here you can configure SABnzbd in more detail with such things as watch folder, completed folder, scheduling etc. I didn't read any user guides except for the scheduler help and managed to get it up and running in no time. It's dirt simple. Save your nzb file to the watch folder, SABnzbd automatically downloads the pieces, fixes any problems, unrars it and saves it to an output folder of your choice, eg. completed. Everything is taken care of on the DS. I have a DS211J so nothing flash and all working well. You can expect your CPU usage to climb with every task you have running so if you're still downloading another file while the unrar process runs you will see your CPU usage increase noticeably.

I've setup scheduling so that at any hour users might want to stream media or surf the net, SABnzbd+ isn't hogging all the internet bandwidth or DS CPU, ie. I hammer the downloads during middle of the night and since the download is so fast, it's going to complete and unrar during that offpeak time as well. In the morning, all is ready for me.

In response to a couple of other posts re speed and scheduling I replied with the following and thought they might help others in any decisions they are making:

1/ My DS211J max's out my download but I'm stuck with ADSL at 850kB/s down (no ADSL2/cable etc. available in my area) so I have to throttle using the scheduling during hours I want to also surf the net. Friend has a DS212+ and his ISP is throttling at 2.5MB/s for popular news sites. Have heard others say on forum they can't max their download speed but this is all I can offer from my own experience which is to say, it's fast compared to what I've had, eg. uTorrent and BTguard.

2/ Download station in DSM 4.0-2198 still doesn't appear to support unrar, scheduling didn't work properly as I couldn't get it to throttle at all and anytime you paused it started the whole file again. SABnzbd can pause and resume no problems. I think Synology has a way to go in the download client department although what they offer is a great achievement and deserves credit but won't suit "advanced" users. I have no regrets installing the mertymade SABnzbd package.

PS. If you feel there are any errors to fix or other edits that will help others, please let me know.

[Metrik]

Thanks, jm! I'm sure this will come in handy, if I decide to try SABnzbd.

[friji]

Thank you Jokemeister for this help. I to have the DS211j and have installed SABnzbd and am still trying to figure out how to use it.

Do you have coach potato or sickbeard installed? If you do, i would really appreciate a simple tutorial how to set this up efficiently.

Thanks

Tobias

[friji]

Thanks JM for this help. I also too have just got the DS211j and am just setting up Sabnzdb as am fed up of auto rar-ing files!

One question, can we access SABnzdb when say at work? I can access my Synology as i setup ddns with no-ip.org. but when using same address and changing port from :5000 to :9200 which is the domain it says when clicking more on Sabnzbd + 6.9 noting happens. How do i access Sabnzbd when say at work?

Do you have coach potato setup or sickbeared? If you do, would you mind doing an easy tutorial on setting these up that would be great?

Help would be greatly appreciated. I am loving the Synology product at the moment, i just feel i haven't got it properly configured yet.

Kindest
Tobias

[inkaman]

Hello, what about port forwarding in the port mapping options of your router?
You need to tell your router the lokal and public port is "9200" he has to listen to.
Looks like this for example:

NAT Options ==> port-mapping ==>
--------------------------------------------------------------------
No.........LAN-IP..........Protokolltype.............LAN-Port.........public-port.....aktiv
1.......192.168.1.??...........TCP..........................9200....................9200..............yes

After this you can try http://192.168.1.??:9200/sabnzbd/ or http://YOUR.DOMAIN.NAME:9200/sabnzbd/

My SABnzbd run´s like a charm
Best regards from Germany

[jokemeister]

I'm heartened that others are reading the post and hope that it leads to further sharing of information and experiences. I'll do my best to help but please understand that I'm not an expert. If you get completely stumped, I'd suggest seeking help from the people who created the package you installed as they typically have a forum of their own. So with that out of the way....

friji, accessing your DS from the internet is usually quite straight forward but you do need to get your ducks in a row. For the sake of the exercise, I'll go through the whole process so that it doesn't really matter where your starting point is.

1/ Configure your DS with a static IP. The reason for this is that you don't want your DHCP server (usually your broadband router) to assign a different IP address every time you restart your router or your DS, otherwise when a message comes in from the internet to port 9200, your router won't know what IP address to forward it to. Go to Control Panel > Network > Network Interface and check <Use Manual Configuration>. You'll then need to set a static IP address. I've got mine set to 192.168.1.5 with a subnet of 255.255.255.0 and Disable Jumbo Frame mtu 1500. You do need to be sure that your router does not assign that IP to any other device on your network. Check your router setup and typically it will have a starting and finishing IP range that the DHCP server will be allowed to use. Mine uses 192.168.1.50 to 192.168.1.100 so I can use any IP address other than those as long as it starts with 192.168.1 and isn't already used by another device on my network, and must be ultimately be between 192.168.1.0 and 192.168.1.255. Your router is usually 192.168.1.1. If your network uses 192.168.0.xxx then of course you need to be consistent with that.

2/ Configure your router to port forward the ports that are relevant. For a full list of ports used by the Synology DSM, look here: http://www.synology.com/support/faq_show.php?q_id=299. For SABnzbd+ from Mertymade, port 9200 is used (for non SSL) so to access from outside your LAN, ie. the internet, your router needs to forward messages for port 9200 to your DS on port 9200. If your router is in the supported router list, that should be really easy by going to Control Panel > Router Configuration and adding the entry. If your router isn't supported, then you need to log in to your router's configuration interface and do it manually. Still not difficult. Most routers will use 192.168.1.1 as their default IP address so simply type that into your browser address bar and you should be presented with your routers login screen. Find the port fowarding config page and make the necessary entries.

3/ If your ISP gives you a dynamic IP address, then subscribe to a DDNS (dynamic DNS) service like the free www.no-ip.com. This is so that if your ISP assigns a new public IP address to your router, your DS advises the DDNS service of the change and all you have to remember is your no-ip domain, eg. mysabnzbd.no-ip.org. For example, when you go to www.google.com, the DNS servers know what the IP address is so you don't need to. Humans work better in plain english. Note in my example mysabnzbd.no-ip.org, that the text "mysabnzbd" needs to unique so don't expect to all be able to use that. When you set up the DDNS Host/Redirect, I use Host Type: Host DNS (A) and leave everything else at the default settings. Using my example, now when I'm outside my network and type into my browser address bar http://mysabnzbd.no-ip.org:9200, I get a login screen to the SABnzbd+ interface. If I'm inside my network I would use my local IP, eg. 192.168.1.5:9200. This is because most routers don't support something called loopback. Never mind the details, just know that you need to use the local IP inside your network and your no-ip address from outside.

4/ Configure your DDNS setup on your DS. In DSM 3.2 go to Control Panel > DDNS or in DSM4.0 go to Control Panel ezCloud. Note that the details you enter into the DS for this is your account details for the DDNS service so that your DS has the privileges necessary to advise the DDNS service of a change in your IP address.

5/ At this point you should be able to login to SABnzbd+ on your DS from the internet using a browser and entering http://mysabnzbd.no-ip.org:9200 (It wasn't necessary for me to add /sabnzbd like inkaman to the end of that address). An important note though is that your ability to login will depend on whether or not your company blocks the ports you want to use. Plenty of people have reported issues with their companies blocking ports so if you can login while at home but not remotely, try a different location like a friends place which would be less likely to have ports blocked. You can just as easily use your smartphone to browse to your DS SABnzbd interface.

I haven't tried couch potato or sickbeard so can't offer any help with that at this time.

Hope this helps. If you find that I've missed something or there is an error, please let me know and I'll edit accordingly.

[friji]

Hi JM,

Thank you very much for that step by step tutorial, it was Very helpful for me, and i'm sure for other synology users.

I have now managed to setup access to sabnzbd remotely now on the port :9200 and is downloading files fine from sick beard.

I am having one issue in that it doesn't seem to be unrar'ing files when they are completed. This is a massive annoyance if anything as i have to manually unrar these files. Are you able to help with this JM please? In Sab switches>Config> i have unrar ticked so it should be doing it.

Help would be greatly appreciated.

Kindest,
Frij

[jokemeister]

Hi friji, since you mention Sickbeard etc. I'm assuming you are using the Superzebulon package. I'm not sure how it handles unrar but the Mertymade SABnzbd+ package required the Compression Utils package as a prereqisite so I'd be thinking the same is true for Superzebulon. You could try installing the Mertymade Base Utils and Compression Utils or perhaps better is to visit the Superzebulon site and see what it has to say. Once you have it sorted I can add it to my first post so that people get a heads up straight away as to Superzebulon's SABnzbd package prerequisites. Sorry I can't offer more at this time.

[knightzz]

Hello,

I checked the links on the original post and it does not seem like Superzebulon nor Mertymade support my DS212. The packages(including the supporting ones) seem to support last year's version.

Please advise on what I can do. I found it a bit odd that the download station can download NZBs but cannot unrar or repair with par2.

I just got my DS212 about a month ago and so I'm still learning about it. The DSM version I'm using is 4.0-2197.

Thank you for your time.

Phil

[jokemeister]

knightzz, looking at the CPU's used by the DS211's and DS212's, they are the same albeit some of them are clocked differently so:
DS211J and DS212J both use Marvell Kirkwood mv6281 cpu
DS211/DS211+ and DS212/DS212+ all use the Marvell Kirkwood mv6282 cpu

so just download the equivalent packages for your cpu. What I don't know is if you install the Mertymade Base Utils and Compression Utils will provide unrar for the Superzebulon SABnzbd+ package.

[chouf]

Hi,

I've been using SABnzb on my 211j for a couple of months now.
The setup works like a charm. I drop the nzb file in a watch folder and the SABnzb on the Syno starts downloading and sorting the file for me in different categories(I've created one subfolder per category in the watch folder.

I've one small issue though, a file downloaded via SABnzb (let's say a movie file), will not show up via DLNA until I rename the file. Only then, the file will show up.

Any idea why?

Thanks

[jokemeister]

Hi chouf, do you think this issue relates to SABnzbd or is it an issue with the DLNA service? My thinking is only that you may be better off posing your question under a thread related to DLNA. Regardless, it's a flow on from the use of SABnzbd so hopefully someone can help and enlighten us all.

[floateruk]

Thanks for the guide. It really helped.

For some reason the mertymade sabnzb helper wouldn't work straight away. It decided to work after about 20 mins though.

Thought I'd mention it in case other found the same issue and think that's its not going to work. I have a Ds212j.

[chouf]

Hi chouf, do you think this issue relates to SABnzbd or is it an issue with the DLNA service? My thinking is only that you may be better off posing your question under a thread related to DLNA. Regardless, it's a flow on from the use of SABnzbd so hopefully someone can help and enlighten us all.

Hi,
After some research I've found on several forum posts that the problem seems to be with the indexing service. Apparently this service only detects a change at the file level (and then indexes the file) when there's an operation (rename, creation) done via the DSM file explorer or via Windows, but not via other automated tool such as SABNzb, or also most probably with any other tool handling files.

For me this is no longer an issue because I'll put another device (a mini HTPC) between the Syno and the TV, but this is no a real solution I agree.

[fender4645]

I'm holding off on upgrading to 4.0 till all the issues get worked out for SAB, Sickbeard, and Couch Potato, however someone asked about a guide on setting these all up. I found this excellent tutorial. It's not specific to the Synology packages but work none of the less.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=120406