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Why I Moved Plex and Jellyfin from TrueNAS to Debian

Consolidating storage and media services onto one Debian VM made the homelab easier to run.

·Article·Homelab·2 min read
On this page
  1. The old arrangement
  2. Why Debian
  3. What is better now
  4. Adding Jellyfin without risking Plex
  5. The trade-off

The old arrangement

A TrueNAS VM owned the ZFS pools and shared them out. Plex ran as an application on top of that storage. On paper that is a tidy separation of jobs. For a single-user lab on one Proxmox host, it mostly added a layer to reason about.

The practical problem was small and persistent: Plex wrote its configuration and cache over NFS. That put permissions and ACL behaviour inside what should have been an application concern, and every change crossed the virtual network between the two VMs.

Why Debian

I created a Debian VM and moved ownership of the ZFS pools to it. It was a staged move rather than a rebuild: both pools were verified before any application path changed, and the existing Plex database and metadata came along, so users, watch history and libraries stayed intact. The old TrueNAS VM stays powered off as a fallback.

What is better now

  • Plex reads ZFS datasets locally instead of over NFS.
  • Storage permissions, application access and container paths all live on one VM, which makes problems quicker to find.
  • Plex’s configuration and cache sit on local storage, so the NFS ACL trouble is gone.
  • Plex and Jellyfin share read-only media mounts.
Proxmox host
└── Debian media VM
    ├── local ZFS pools
    ├── Plex      (reads datasets directly)
    └── Jellyfin  (Docker, read-only media, own config)

Adding Jellyfin without risking Plex

Jellyfin runs as a separate Docker service with its own configuration and cache and read-only access to the media. The Plex database is never touched, which makes Jellyfin a low-risk way to try a free alternative while Plex stays in use.

For outside access it goes through the existing Cloudflare Tunnel, so there is no new router port. A login page comes first, and Jellyfin’s own accounts control what each person can see.

The trade-off

A dedicated NAS can be the right answer in other setups. In this one the extra appliance boundary stopped earning its complexity. Proxmox still provides isolation and rollback points, and read-only mounts, to be clear, are not backups.