horus_son_of_isis

It’s even enough to add a lite desktop manager to debian for that gui goodness.

You’re right, it’s more than enough to run debian, docker, and a host of containers, so OP can start experimenting, but anything dealing with video or audio will gobble that up in minutes.

I’m ready for the debian port to android cell phones. I have a pile and it would be so cool to make each into a server running off USB power with the battery bypassed.

I like lenovo thinkcentres I have a 700 series and a 900 series. At the time, one was less than $100 and one was $150. I put another ~$80 for old ram and old SAS drives. They’re working great and I have what I consider to be huge storage. Things are different now, but used office computers are always going to be plentiful, the only limitation is how old you want to go. Good news is that Debian will practically run on anything and doing docker via SSH CLI isn’t hard, especially if you get Dockhand or Portainer(for now) running first. If you’re serving data, 256gb won’t get though.

My solution would be to have a sync-thinged folder, then, using filebrowser, create users for everyone you want to have access, and limit their access to that specific directory. Then your syncthing works like always, and the current directory is available online at anytime. It would be up to you whether to allow read/write/delete privileges on the firebrowser accounts. This way, whatever syncthing can’t work with, there’s still online access. Cloudflared access would be another good layer of protection.

I’ve bought several hard drives from ebay and had good luck so far. I’m buying them used, so i only buy reliable brands. Before everything went crazy, I was getting obscene deals on SAS drives. I just had to install a SAS card (it was easy and like $15). I do need to go do a backup right now, though, because I’ve been using my regular backup drives to play with distros and AI.

what do you mean?

I made RAG Ai assistant this weekend that references a library of documents (mostly pdf). It answers questions with analysis, gives direct quotes, and recommends related documents. So yes, I would download a plagiarism machine. It is vibe-coded because I am not smart enough to do it the right way. That said, I will not be sharing it; its just for me; the way Linus intended.

one of the learning curves on jellyfin is naming conventions. you have to read the documentation on it. if you don’t have the file named appropriately respective of the type of media, Jellyfin won’t know how to categorize it. I use renamer a lot for bulk renaming, and you can often rearrange the info in the file name pretty easily once you get a handle on how renamer works.

Bingo. People can be so tribal about this shit. If you value privacy and hate subscriptions, jellyfin is you homie. It isn’t as hard to set up as some would have you believe (i’m a normie and have used it for years).

If you don’t give a fuck about privacy and don’t mind paying some creep to make it easy for you to access your own files, then Plex is fine. This is the camp some people are in, and it’s just as legitimate as mine. Life is about gray areas and compromise.

+1 for dropping plex for jellyfin.

I nuked plex when they started requiring an internet connection to log in- meaning plex was phoning-home even though I had not exposed the service to the internet in any way. I don’t know about you, but I don’t need an evil corporation knowing my catalog of linux distros.

• all of the plex premium options can be replicated for free, so fuckem.

Self-hosting is illegal in 5 … 4 … 3 …

I have a feeling that shit is about to stop. Look at the war on encryption.

If someone could explain how this could ever work in a world full of selfish turds, I might stop cringing every time it’s mentioned. I’m not mad at it, and don’t think someone who talks about it is stupid. I own my ignorance on the subject, but I also embrace my absolute distrust and disgust with the human race.

How’s it compare to Portainer? I hear Portainer is about to be enshitified.

I started with docker desktop on windows for a year. Got tired of resources redlining because windows is greedy. Tried proxmox and just couldn’t get past the setup (don’t remember which part). Anyway, running headless Debian is working really well for about 2 months now. Between cockpit and my codeserver container I can get most anything done through gui. I even installed comai llm on my mint desktop machine to help me with commands.

With unprecedented temps in excess of 106 F, running a couple of old lenovo desktops is nothing compared to my AC bill.

I’m running a simple COMAI instance on my desktop that recommends linux commands and does limited chat. it was easy. It spins the processor up to 50% to give a response and takes a couple of seconds depending on complexity. I run the other stuff on a dedicated server, but with nginx proxy manager, I can send the COMAI instance to a page on my domain even though it is on a different computer on my LAN.

It isn’t nearly as much fun a building a dedicated server, (or what I like to do – repurpose old junk) but the services you mentioned will run just fine on a decent desktop or laptop, especially if you aren’t doing some hungry task while they are running. -1 for Plex. +1 for Jellyfin. You can run them all on your LAN and access them around the house by the machine’s LAN IP and the services’ port number. You can do the same thing if you have tailscale on your phone or other remote computer, just use the tailscale IP and the service’s port. You can use Nginx Proxy Manager to send your services through a cloudflared tunnel to a hostname you buy, and keep access limited to just yourself and a select few (FYI I hear Cloudflared doesn’t like a lot of video streaming, so don’t give access to too many folks).

Jellyfin will run on a windows machine without screwing with docker, and will host your music too, though the UI isn’t great.

You can use a simple fileserver on windows to host other stuff like pics.

Just start somewhere and you’ll be neck-deep before you know it. You can use

I don’t understand the tone of this comment. Family link is voluntary. It is lame, yes, and it is just barely useful, but it offers some handy controls if you want to limit what your kid can access on an android device. It would be preferable for me to have a good kiosk mode, but I haven’t seen anything that met my needs.

or just buy a minipc for $130 from Ebay.

It is frustrating though, I have several old phones that are in good shape. It would be nice to give them a job. There might be one or two that boot without a battery.

it happens to every one of them eventually. Wonder what really causes it?

I’m so close to doing this. Cloudflare makes me nervous. Have you heard of Rathole? That was recommended to basically do what my cloudflared tunnel is already doing. The only trouble I could see was I was going to have to keep the cloudflared access controls.

if you wire up some blinky LEDs to the power supply, then yes. I NEEDS THEM BLINKYS

Next step is to free the acer from it’s physical bonds and screw the motherboard to the 3D printed stand.

bro doesn’t get it. A substantial subset of selfhosting is using old tired stuff to make new sweet stuff. The only new parts on my machines are nvme ssds for the OSes and plugs and wire adapters. Everything else is yanked from an ancient unit or bought from ebay for pennies on the dollar of new. My services are free and my machines were close.

RomM looks really cool. I’ve had difficulty with getting the Retroarch container to play roms with acceptable latency and without crashing. Is RomM easy to set up and does it handle the heavy lifting in such a way as to not tax resources? I’m on an i5 thinkstation with onboard graphics. My system does not like Wayland at all.

I hear you on that. Just sharing my experience with this new toy I really like. Someday we’ll be able to flash these android machines to a google-free OS, and that will be wonderful. Oh and it plays games in an emulator everything up to PSP.

If you’re talking about running a jellyfin client, not a server, get an android tv box. I have two tiers of ONN android boxes, 4k and 4k pro. I installed projectivy and smartube, as well as a client for navidrome and jellyfin. NO ADS EVER. I’m head over heels. The jellyfin client on the 4k was weird for a while, but I disabled a bunch of metadata plugins on the server and it straightened up.

I suspect as long as you’re just playing things off the server and there is no transcoding or whatnot going on, you should be fine.

I’m Happy either way. That code is the compose for the Firefox container I use. Lemmy just didn’t like my formatting.