mosiacmango

Lawerence systems has a recent video that is pretty indepth.

There is not, but Infuse is what the Jellyfin project officially recommends.

Trees are also essential for insects, bird and animal life in cities. They are psychologically calming for people as well.

The lift here is that you setup the end users client. If they aren’t local, buy one and ship it. Since it will be on your always on tailscale vpn, you can then interact with it remotely if needed.

Android tvs can be had for $35, Raspi 5 are around the same range, with apple tvs about $130. Have people pony up the cash and mail one of what they want out to them.

That may be too much to ask if you share to a lot of casual friends/family, but its been a successful answer for me.

Jellyfin takes more work, but can be a “simple” end user experience if you set it up for them.

Use a reverse proxy to get a letsenceypt cert for your jellyfin server. SWAG, Caddy, lots of options. Then setup a free tailscale account and add your jellyfin server to your tailnet. Install the jellyfin and tailscale apps on the user android tv/apple tv/computer, then enroll the devices in your tailnet.

They will have always on, ssl secured, vpn protected media sharing for free.

They sold to private equity a couple years back. The enshittification started that day.

Ive been using pop-os for my desktop for years. Ive had no update headaches, roll back issues, or anything else that would compel me to swap distros for one that made these things better.

So to answer your question:

None of the above are compelling features that justify the work to switch off an already very stable distro.

The app points back to always on servers you have setup to automatically download media on their own.

It wont do anything for you if you fire up a torrent client and go download media manually.

Wazuh is popular. It’s in use by name brand companies, FOSS and relatively turnkey.

Graylog is also a popular option.

Look into podman quadlets. Its containers as systemd services, and its excellent. They run as root by default, but can be run at a user level pretty easily. Ive had no permissions issues as long as you define the user/group in the config and ensure they habe the correct rights to the required folders.

It does take translation from docker compose files, but it’s entirely doable. Most of the environmental variables translate straight across.

Well, the first step is realizing it’s okay not to use it. My homelab is a mix of salvaged mini PCs and prosumer networking gear. It has nothing to do with the 6/7 figure gear I use at work, and I prefer it that way. Its simpler and lower stakes, is quieter, and uses way less power.

That all said, if you do want to use it, there are many ways to start. First, you don’t need to plug both power supplies in, but you can. The server can run entirely on one of them. It has two in case one fails it can keep running, not because it needs 2x the power. For the monitor, yes you will likely need VGA. Servers rarely have modern video ports, because vga just works, costs nothing to add to a server, and is almost never used. Most of your physical interaction with a server should be though “out of band,” which dell calls “idrac.” This is a seperate networking port labeled on the server that lets you connect to a local website, put in a password, and then fully control the server. That includes powering it on, reboots, loading disc image iso files, on and on. The idrac will stay powered even when the server is off.

You may or may not have qn idrac license for that server. If you dont and your boss can’t give you one, you can use something like jetkvm instead when it’s released.

As to what to do either it, i would recommend installing different hypervisors or kubernetes suites and playing around. Proxmox, xcp-ng, k3s, harvestor, on and on. Once you find one you like, figure out how to use automation software to setup VMs and containers, like cloudinit, terraform, ansible, or nixOS.

Good luck, and enjoy. Getting started from scratch can be a lot, but it can also be a lot of fun. Go into it expecting to fail, fail a lot and try to learn what you like. That’s the best thing a homelab can do for you.

Amen to the weird network quirks. I was trying to use the Tailscale docker sidecar examples, but could not work put how to use them in quadlets.

I expect i need to make a .pod or .network file and comingle the quadlets that way, but just setting up a dedicated tailscale subnet router VM with /32 allowed addresses was about 10x easier.

Here’s a pretty good list to get started with:

Awesome Jellyfin

Plex was bought out by venture capital and has been enshittifing for years. “Free” media stream sources added riddled with ads that you have to opt out of, opt out “everyone can see what everyone is watching” features, nebulous “we need to upload hashes of your media to skip credits” privacy issues, abandoning apps for various platforms like kodi, on and on.

I have a lifetime pass, but no longer consider plex a viable platform. The issues are not baseless, but rather based on what plex has decided to do to make money.

Meanwhile, jellyfin is FOSS with no profit motive, no privacy issues, skips intros and credits with no issue, pulls subtitles down and indexes media flawlessly, and has native kodi clients with Database sync support so a show paused in one room can be resumed at the same point in another room.

Hard to beat “slick, private and free.”

The addons are great too. The intro/outro skip is slick and nearly flawless, background subtitle download is seamless, on and on.

Its no longer actively supported. It likely still works, but redhat is moving away from it in favor of quadlets.

Quadlets use systemd files to manage containers, which is excellent, its just a departure from compose.

This changes a bit when you start using podman quadlets instead of docker compose, but most compose commands have an analog in the quadlet syntax.

Ive yet to run into any compose files that I couldn’t translate, but some functions took a bit. The quadlet docs from redhat really help there.