I Reset a Password and Broke Half My Server
A forgotten qBittorrent password kicked off a chain reaction through Radarr, Sonarr, and Jellyseerr — here's the whole mess and how it got fixed.
It started with something completely unrelated: I wanted better visibility into what my server was actually doing, so I set up Beszel to track CPU, RAM, and GPU usage per container. Nice, tidy, boring infrastructure work. While I was in there tidying up, I also killed off Stirling-PDF, which was quietly eating almost a gigabyte of RAM on a box that only has 7.
Then, because I was already poking around, I remembered I’d completely forgotten my qBittorrent password. Fine, easy fix — blank it out, restart, grab the temporary password from the logs, set a new one. Except I didn’t stop to think about who else was using that password.
Turns out: Radarr and Sonarr were. The moment I changed it, both of them started hammering qBittorrent with the old, now-wrong credentials, qBittorrent’s brute-force protection banned them outright, and every download silently stopped working. I only found out because I went looking for something I’d requested through Jellyseerr and it just… wasn’t there.
That sent me down a proper rabbit hole. First I had to actually get the new password working — which involved qBittorrent rewriting its own config out from under me mid-edit, a temporary password that mysteriously stopped authenticating, and me eventually just computing the PBKDF2 hash by hand and writing it straight into the config to stop guessing. Then I found a second, completely unrelated bug sitting in Jellyseerr: neither Radarr nor Sonarr was marked as the “default” server, so some requests were quietly getting dropped on the floor before they even reached Radarr. Two separate items I’d asked for had just vanished with zero trace.
While I was down there I checked on the indexers too, since RuTracker and EZTV had both gone dark (Cloudflare blocking them). Swapped in Knaben, TorrentDownload, and LimeTorrents to fill the gap, and confirmed the fixes actually worked by forcing a fresh search — three movies and a whole season of TV that had been stuck for days started downloading within minutes.
Moral of the story: if you’re going to reset a password, go check who else has it saved first. I didn’t, and it cost me an evening.