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Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills. I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-host

Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills. I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions. The subscriptions really had gotten out of hand, it had gotten to about $200 (AUD) a month. Quick napkin math is that I have cancelled about ~$150 a month worth of subscriptions so far. The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling at this point, but it's already paid for itself, so I will likely upgrade it to something much better later this year. Currently I am in the process of replacing all the movie streaming services with Emby. Spotify and Adobe lightroom is still on the todo list. I will likely end up with Youtube, Fastmail and Borgbase being my remaining subscriptions once I am done.

mrheosuper 1y ago
Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A quick math will show that it's not insignificant
- SECProto 1y ago
  > Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A quick math will show that it's not insignificant If you run it 24/7 on a dedicated desktop with decent idle (i.e. no high power video card, low power CPU), it likely uses ~ 50W average. That gives an estimate of 0.05kW24hr30 = 36kWh, which would be in the range of $12/month at current australian electricity prices. If you have bad idle power usage (or somehow mostly active not idle), maybe you'd be looking at twice that. But for OP who was spending $xxx/month on subscriptions, it's a pretty negligible cost. If you really want to save this too, raspPi can do a lot of home server needs nowadays
  - ninjinxo 1y ago
    An N100 minipc or second-hand Dell Optiplex doesn't cost too much more than a rasp-Pi ($100-200), has a lot more power, and will only pull about 10W idle. My optiplex shows as 8.191 kwh last month -> 11w average.
    - SECProto 1y ago
      yep yep n100s are great. I just use my gaming desktop as server, uses more money in power but it'd be on for hours a day anyway and i already own it, so i'm not concerned.
    - morsch 1y ago
      Is 10W idle the lowest one can reasonably get a small home server? As a comparison, that's about as much as my fridge draws on average. Also, a mechanism to maximize the time spent at idle would be useful. Basically all the optimisations done for phones.
      - kassner 1y ago
        The Mac Mini M4 can draw as little as 3W during video playback via HDMI, but all your energy savings will be offset by the price of storage. There are plenty of old laptops that would be a great replacement, mine draws 8W at idle with 2x2TB SSDs: https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2023/05/16/reusing-old-hardware/ https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2023/05/16/reusing-old-hardwar... I’m interested in the next generation: arm64 machines with 2xM.2 slots could do wonders as an idler.
  - bigfatkitten 1y ago
    Unless you've got a decent amount of rooftop solar. I haven't paid an electricity bill in four years.
  - mrheosuper 1y ago
    Those HDD will quickly add to total power consumptions OP was trying to replace streaming services, so he gonna need storage. Assuimg he had 3 hdd for raid 5, that is another 15*3 = 45w
    - SECProto 1y ago
      Looking at a WD spec sheet, it's more like 6-7W during read/write, and 3-4W during idle (1W sleep). Assume your use spread however you want, but that would be a max average of 5W usage per drive, so another 5-20W depending on your storage needs.
- Semaphor 1y ago
  Dunno, my N100 with 1 SSD and 1 nVME (which hosts over 15 services including jellyfin) is probably not really relevant compared to my desktop PC. ~10W vs 180-350W depending on what I’m doing.
- anthropodie 1y ago
  Run it on Raspberry Pi. It brings down electric consumption significantly.
  - myaccountonhn 1y ago
    Or a cluster if old phones with postmarketos
- 01100011 1y ago
  And while it heats your home in the winter, it also puts more strain on your A/C in the summer. There are also noise and light pollution issues if it's near a bedroom.
Inviz 1y ago
What do we do about Lightroom? Capture one? How about sharing galleries?
- sathyabhat 1y ago
  Immich is pretty good for sharing photos. https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/
  - Scene_Cast2 1y ago
    Immich is amazing, but it's a Google Photos alternative, not a RAW editor alternative.
- presto8 1y ago
  I like darktable as a Lightroom alternative.
- iLoveOncall 1y ago
  Rawtherapee has a better UX than Lightroom in my opinion and I've never felt limited by it.
- chillfox 1y ago
  I don't know. I was dumb enough to move my entire photo library into Lightroom cloud back when they released that. It's a nightmare. It's pretty easy to export the photos, you get them down organized by date and photos with edits are there both as the original and a "-edited" version. What is missing is the library organization. I really want to get my library organization as well, it's very valuable to me, it's what has got the details of what photos was from what event. And I don't really know how to get that down. I am thinking I will have to scrape it from the webapp or something like that. It's been left to last as it's both one of the cheaper subscriptions and a total nightmare to get out of. As for what app to use when it's all down, Capture One or Darktable seems reasonable with a network attached drive.
- npodbielski 1y ago
  You might check out https://www.photoprism.app/ https://www.photoprism.app/
anthropodie 1y ago
>Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills. >I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions. I have been doing the same for quite some time now but it's only recently I realized all these subscriptions services are just making rich richer. We should encourage self hosting as much as possible. I mean why should we pay huge corporations more money just for storage?
- flessner 1y ago
  For "content subscriptions" (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix) keep in mind that a part of the revenue goes towards the content creators. For anything else, I can also highly recommend using local or self-hosted software. Plenty of open source software has even exceeded proprietary alternatives in the last couple years.
  - WhyNotHugo 1y ago
    I suspect that buying an album through bandcamp results in the artist receiving way more money than what a subscription will ever pay them.
    - flessner 1y ago
      Absolutely, this was more of an appeal towards the "torrent crowd" that often doesn't even think about compensating the artists.
  - TychoCelchuuu 1y ago
    [dead]
  - itissid 1y ago
    You know if we could this open source self hosted stuff with a layer of Patreon on top people would pay something to all the people. If one could make it non-intrusive it could become a decent alternative to paying all these artists. I think Kanopy.com comes pretty close, its funded by tax payer dollars and is available via your local library.
layoric 1y ago
This reflects a lot of what I've been through as well. My subscriptions exploded when AU got a lot of different streaming platforms, and I think when paramount+ came out and took Star Trek off of another one I drew the line. I realised I still owned all the physical media, so time to make backups. Previous to that I moved off Gmail, that was by far the hardest, and still somewhat ongoing after 8+ years. The hardest to kick for me now is YouTube Premium.. And in AU it's like $33/month AUD, but I just can't stand ads. Now I self host: - Own Mastodon instance - Photos (Synology) - Videos (Synology) - Audio (Synology) - Storage (Minio) - Code/Build (Forejo) - Security (Synology) My NAS is blocked from the internet, while web facing stuff is on a separate server (old dell workstation). And now have added a PI hole to another older dell box. My partner's laptop will be moving to Linux and will also be a Windows free household. I used Windows since 3.1, I liked it up until around Windows 7. I'm glad I've moved to Linux, but disappointed to see what has happened to Windows in general. I want to self host more services for family, but the experience isn't there yet without quite a lot of work. The tags #homelab and #selfhost are pretty decent to follow on Mastodon btw!
- godelski 1y ago
  I've been on this mission but unfortunately also trying to defend my PhD in a month. But I do have a lot more Linux experience. Here's stuff that I think will really help. yt-dlp: a video downloaded. Originally designed for YouTube but supports a lot of sites. I suggest heavily aliasing this with options like sleep intervals, aria2, and make sure you download the user agent switcher. For YouTube you probably need to import cookies from a browser. But you'll be able to watch the videos without the ads. Btrfs: it's a file system, like ext4 or ntfs. Has a lot of useful things like being able to create subvolumes, raid, cache drives (or volumes), quotas, snapshots, etc. Think anything that you'd do with zfs but it's been easier to use and it has a copy on write system that helps dedupe. You can also compress the file system! I use duperemover. If it finds dupes it replaces one file with a link (which btrfs natively supports). It'll hash the files so run it early and then set up a job (use a systemd timer) Tailscale: take your network anywhere. God, tailscale is so fucking useful. You can even put it on a raspberry pi or your phones. It's nice to have it on an old phone which you can throw termux on and have a little server. I've used these to jump to another machine that has had issues where it could connect locally but not outside. You can also set up exit nodes so you can do things like push all your traffic through a vpn, make all your traffic use pihole, or just make it appear like you're somewhere else. You could use this to even make it effectively impossible for streaming services to know you're sharing an account. The data is going through whoever's house pays. If you get fancy you can set up rules to port specific traffic through specific locations but this is still a bit above my head. I just know it's possible. Unfortunately with iPhones you have less control. They can even break out of all this and you don't have full control. I need to get someone to explain more networking to me. Systemd: it's annoying at first but damn there's so much to it that is helpful. Use systemctl edit to edit your service files. The ones that come with services like jellyfin aren't nearly as locked down as they should be (I intend to push to them in a few months). You should also use systemd mount for your drives. You need a companion automount file but your drives will go offline when not being used. This will really help with reducing energy costs. Be sure to note that there's even configs for you gpus. It also lets you control a systems resources. There's also nspawn and vmspawn. I wish these were a bit more popular because they can do everything docker can and more. Nspawn is a suped up chroot so you can really containerize things and even run different Linux flavors (I've even been play around with running an arm container on my x86 machine). Using machinectl you can enable these as services and even create triggers to spin up or down. There's also importctl so if you create an image (or someone else does) you can just pull that! Which kinda makes it easier than docker in many cases other than the fact that not many people have made images (or publicly available). Docker's big win is popularity but systemd has felt nicer in every other way (documentation sucks). There's so much more to systemd and that's why it's loved and hated. There's a reason it stuck, it just is too damn useful (don't forget to check out homectl too) Ffmpeg: you probably know this one but it's also worth spending some time to learn it more and write some scripts. If you care more about storage I encode most stuff to av1 with nvenc. It's not archival but honestly I'm often getting 50% storage reductions and I can't tell the difference. Your source file probably wasn't archival grade anyways. Good enough for me. Hevc is also giving me good success. There's a bunch of other little tools that help. For example, I have my main computer sitting behind my TV. If I'm working on it I'm in it via ssh. Otherwise games and movies are on the TV. I use ydotool as a keyboard and just made a shortcut on my iPhone and a trivial script on my Android so I can push commands that way and use a wireless mouse. There's kconnect but it's been more a hassle than help ime. I did the same for backing up photos on from my phones (they wake the drives first). Android can rsync but for iPhone I can't find a good free solution other than writing the hackiest shortcut you've seen (ssh in, check if file exists, if not then write. You can't rsync, the fucking thing will timeout and despite there being terminal emulators for iPhone you can't access your photos from them. I've found zero ways to link them and I'm upset). Check out things like fail2ban to jail users that do too many logins. You can also use nspawn to containerize these services, spin up and down, and between btrfs, homectl, and pam it is really easy to containerize users. You can mount their volumes on demand and get their accounts syncing across your intranet. It's kinda crazy what you can do. My goal is to get some images so many of these things can start becoming plug and play. I'm getting close but obviously bigger priorities right now. I'd love help if anyone is interested. I'm not an expert in these domains so I'm sure I'm doing some things wrong but I'm learning a ton
bane 1y ago
Unraid makes a lot of the home lab stuff pretty easy. There's a very active community, good docs, frequent updates. It costs a little, but it's one time and worth it, and can grow as you have time and money to add stuff to it.
- udev4096 1y ago
  You have to be extremely dumb to even think of using unraid. It introduces a hard dependency on whatever you do and is nothing more than a glorious wrapper for managing docker services
  - bane 1y ago
    What dependency is that? Unraid is mostly used for storage management, the docker and vm parts are definitely side bits to the system.
    - udev4096 1y ago
      Yes, mostly storage. But why? Storage == ZFS. ZFS cli is well documented and works extremely well. Don't use unraid or truenas or any other fancy UI. I know the appeal from the beginners but it's not worth it
      - bane 1y ago
        You might be amazed to discover there's a an entire world of storage outside of ZFS.
        MrDrMcCoy 1y ago
        You might be amazed to find there's a lot of good reasons the storage world moved away from the RAID4 model Unraid relies on. They're proprietary too, which isn't great if you care about recoverability or never being in a position where they can withdraw your license.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
smj-edison 1y ago
What do you do for backups? I'm just setting up an Emby instance with a 4 TB hard drive attached, but I'm worried it'll fail and take everything with it.
- Semaphor 1y ago
  Not OP, but I use a PI with attached SSD as a backup server, and then save that stuff to Backblaze B2 as additional cloud backup.
- nickspacek 1y ago
  Look into Backblaze B2. Use rclone, or another backup tool that has S3 compatibility (though B2 API has some additional bells and whistles). With rclone, you can also have a step to seamlessly encrypt the contents on the client side before sending to an external provider like B2. I chose B2 because it is the most affordable option, but rclone supports many backends.
  - switch007 1y ago
    Rclone is a great tool but it is not really a complete backup tool. Ie no snapshots. You can use it to sync local snapshots or to a destination that does snapshots for example Borg/restic are more complete solutions
- dharmab 1y ago
  Amazon S3 Deep Archive and rclone for < 4-5TB. Backblaze in a Windows VM or container for 5TB+.
  - electriclove 1y ago
    Do you have a write up on how to do these?
    - dharmab 1y ago
      No, I sat down for an evening and figured out rclone from their docs: https://rclone.org/docs/ https://rclone.org/docs/
russelg 1y ago
Is there a reason you went with Emby over Jellyfin (forked from Emby)?
- chillfox 1y ago
  Emby just felt more polished and focused while Jellyfin felt like it was on the path towards feature bloat. Also, I had more confidence in Emby supporting future devices I might get than Jellyfin. When it comes to supporting multiple media types (video/audiobooks/music/etc..) I prefer using a seperate solution for each that is focused on that use case instead of an all-in-one solution. I am using audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts, so I really don't need that from my video solution. I have configured Emby to keep the metadata in nfo files next to the videos, so I should be able to easily switch to something else if things change in the future.
artdigital 1y ago
I have my collection in Dropbox, then sync that onto my home server with rclone once a day, which exposes it to Plex. Then I use the Plexamp app (music-only Plex app) to listen across all my devices
Ziggy_Zaggy 1y ago
With all the SWE in the mix, why not just roll your own media player...? It's not THAT hard. Same for movie player btw (and one solution can do both ofc). HTML spec for media is pretty amazing these days, no real excuses outside of time.
- solumunus 1y ago
  Why roll your own media player? The reasons not to seem obvious.
- TJSomething 1y ago
  That's been sitting on my ideas list for over a decade, because I've wanted Pandora that runs locally from my collection. But I'm not sure I'll realistically ever get to it.
- chillfox 1y ago
  Time is pretty much the reason.
nadnad 1y ago
Would love to hear more details about your setup.
- chillfox 1y ago
  It's a pretty simple setup. I run Alpine Linux with ZFS, all apps are in docker containers managed with docker-compose, Caddy for reverse proxy, borgmatic/borg for backup, and some scripts managing zfs snapshots.
BrandoElFollito 1y ago
> The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling at this point I have a ~10 years old desktop as my server (intel skylake and 24GB of RAM). I host about 20 services and the server is not loaded at all. The services are the usual ones, nothing heavy such as LLMs, though
- chillfox 1y ago
  I have got 26 docker containers running on it. Looking at current utilization, it's 6% of cpu, 10GB ram out of 16gb. The issue is disk access. The thing has total shit bandwidth to storage, this was a surprise to me and a bit of a learning experience. It has an nvme ssd and a 3.5 hdd, but in the end usb drives attached to the usb 2 ports are much faster than either. It's a Lenovo, so I guess they cut costs somewhere and the usb 2 ports should have been a giveaway, but I was tricked by the nvme.
HexPhantom 1y ago
$150/month shaved off is no joke. It's funny how these subscriptions creep up until you're basically running a second rent in background services.
bambax 1y ago
Self hosting is absolutely awesome. I upgraded my NAS to a recent Asustor a year ago and it changed my life. JellyFin for video works perfectly everywhere in my home, on any device, and it can also be accessed remotely, securely, with Tailscale, so if I'm in a hotel somewhere with my iPad it still works. And my library is curated by me; it has classic movies and other movies I like, and zero fluff or random shows that I would never watch in a million years. But self hosting doesn't stop here. Using Docker (via Portainer) I can publish any app in minutes, on either Apache or Nginx, securely with a Cloudflare tunnel (free) without ever exposing my home IP to the world. This of course isn't as resilient as a proper server with a proper provider, but it's so much simpler and so much cheaper that for hobby projects it's largely good enough.
zaphodias 1y ago
I'm doing the same, I have family plans with my friends for pretty much anything so I don't think I ever reached such high monthly costs though. I started my home server for self hosting Immich, not only for the cost but because I like to have my images close to me. I also recently replaced Lightroom with ON1, it's definitely not the same quality but, as hobbyist, it didn't make much sense to pay that much for me anymore. It was by far the most expensive subscription I had.
lhamil64 1y ago
Where do you get media from? Piracy is an option, but if you want to do it semi-legally I guess you’d need to rip blu-rays, but that seems like it'd be more expensive than streaming services, and you’d have to wait for everything to be released on blu-ray (if it even does)
- chillfox 1y ago
  I have a large dvd collection from before streaming was really a thing, but yeah I just get blu-rays of the movies I really like. Most of the movies I watch is ones I have already watched. I was really only watching 1-2 movies a month that were new to me with streaming, and few of them were actually new releases.

mrheosuper 1y ago

Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A quick math will show that it's not insignificant

SECProto 1y ago
> Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A quick math will show that it's not insignificant If you run it 24/7 on a dedicated desktop with decent idle (i.e. no high power video card, low power CPU), it likely uses ~ 50W average. That gives an estimate of 0.05kW24hr30 = 36kWh, which would be in the range of $12/month at current australian electricity prices. If you have bad idle power usage (or somehow mostly active not idle), maybe you'd be looking at twice that. But for OP who was spending $xxx/month on subscriptions, it's a pretty negligible cost. If you really want to save this too, raspPi can do a lot of home server needs nowadays
- ninjinxo 1y ago
  An N100 minipc or second-hand Dell Optiplex doesn't cost too much more than a rasp-Pi ($100-200), has a lot more power, and will only pull about 10W idle. My optiplex shows as 8.191 kwh last month -> 11w average.
  - SECProto 1y ago
    yep yep n100s are great. I just use my gaming desktop as server, uses more money in power but it'd be on for hours a day anyway and i already own it, so i'm not concerned.
  - morsch 1y ago
    Is 10W idle the lowest one can reasonably get a small home server? As a comparison, that's about as much as my fridge draws on average. Also, a mechanism to maximize the time spent at idle would be useful. Basically all the optimisations done for phones.
    - kassner 1y ago
      The Mac Mini M4 can draw as little as 3W during video playback via HDMI, but all your energy savings will be offset by the price of storage. There are plenty of old laptops that would be a great replacement, mine draws 8W at idle with 2x2TB SSDs: https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2023/05/16/reusing-old-hardware/ https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2023/05/16/reusing-old-hardwar... I’m interested in the next generation: arm64 machines with 2xM.2 slots could do wonders as an idler.
- bigfatkitten 1y ago
  Unless you've got a decent amount of rooftop solar. I haven't paid an electricity bill in four years.
- mrheosuper 1y ago
  Those HDD will quickly add to total power consumptions OP was trying to replace streaming services, so he gonna need storage. Assuimg he had 3 hdd for raid 5, that is another 15*3 = 45w
  - SECProto 1y ago
    Looking at a WD spec sheet, it's more like 6-7W during read/write, and 3-4W during idle (1W sleep). Assume your use spread however you want, but that would be a max average of 5W usage per drive, so another 5-20W depending on your storage needs.
Semaphor 1y ago
Dunno, my N100 with 1 SSD and 1 nVME (which hosts over 15 services including jellyfin) is probably not really relevant compared to my desktop PC. ~10W vs 180-350W depending on what I’m doing.
anthropodie 1y ago
Run it on Raspberry Pi. It brings down electric consumption significantly.
- myaccountonhn 1y ago
  Or a cluster if old phones with postmarketos
01100011 1y ago
And while it heats your home in the winter, it also puts more strain on your A/C in the summer. There are also noise and light pollution issues if it's near a bedroom.

Inviz 1y ago

What do we do about Lightroom? Capture one? How about sharing galleries?

sathyabhat 1y ago
Immich is pretty good for sharing photos. https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/
- Scene_Cast2 1y ago
  Immich is amazing, but it's a Google Photos alternative, not a RAW editor alternative.
presto8 1y ago
I like darktable as a Lightroom alternative.
iLoveOncall 1y ago
Rawtherapee has a better UX than Lightroom in my opinion and I've never felt limited by it.
chillfox 1y ago
I don't know. I was dumb enough to move my entire photo library into Lightroom cloud back when they released that. It's a nightmare. It's pretty easy to export the photos, you get them down organized by date and photos with edits are there both as the original and a "-edited" version. What is missing is the library organization. I really want to get my library organization as well, it's very valuable to me, it's what has got the details of what photos was from what event. And I don't really know how to get that down. I am thinking I will have to scrape it from the webapp or something like that. It's been left to last as it's both one of the cheaper subscriptions and a total nightmare to get out of. As for what app to use when it's all down, Capture One or Darktable seems reasonable with a network attached drive.
npodbielski 1y ago
You might check out https://www.photoprism.app/ https://www.photoprism.app/

anthropodie 1y ago

>Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills. >I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions. I have been doing the same for quite some time now but it's only recently I realized all these subscriptions services are just making rich richer. We should encourage self hosting as much as possible. I mean why should we pay huge corporations more money just for storage?

flessner 1y ago
For "content subscriptions" (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix) keep in mind that a part of the revenue goes towards the content creators. For anything else, I can also highly recommend using local or self-hosted software. Plenty of open source software has even exceeded proprietary alternatives in the last couple years.
- WhyNotHugo 1y ago
  I suspect that buying an album through bandcamp results in the artist receiving way more money than what a subscription will ever pay them.
  - flessner 1y ago
    Absolutely, this was more of an appeal towards the "torrent crowd" that often doesn't even think about compensating the artists.
- TychoCelchuuu 1y ago
  [dead]
- itissid 1y ago
  You know if we could this open source self hosted stuff with a layer of Patreon on top people would pay something to all the people. If one could make it non-intrusive it could become a decent alternative to paying all these artists. I think Kanopy.com comes pretty close, its funded by tax payer dollars and is available via your local library.

layoric 1y ago

This reflects a lot of what I've been through as well. My subscriptions exploded when AU got a lot of different streaming platforms, and I think when paramount+ came out and took Star Trek off of another one I drew the line. I realised I still owned all the physical media, so time to make backups. Previous to that I moved off Gmail, that was by far the hardest, and still somewhat ongoing after 8+ years. The hardest to kick for me now is YouTube Premium.. And in AU it's like $33/month AUD, but I just can't stand ads. Now I self host: - Own Mastodon instance - Photos (Synology) - Videos (Synology) - Audio (Synology) - Storage (Minio) - Code/Build (Forejo) - Security (Synology) My NAS is blocked from the internet, while web facing stuff is on a separate server (old dell workstation). And now have added a PI hole to another older dell box. My partner's laptop will be moving to Linux and will also be a Windows free household. I used Windows since 3.1, I liked it up until around Windows 7. I'm glad I've moved to Linux, but disappointed to see what has happened to Windows in general. I want to self host more services for family, but the experience isn't there yet without quite a lot of work. The tags #homelab and #selfhost are pretty decent to follow on Mastodon btw!

godelski 1y ago
I've been on this mission but unfortunately also trying to defend my PhD in a month. But I do have a lot more Linux experience. Here's stuff that I think will really help. yt-dlp: a video downloaded. Originally designed for YouTube but supports a lot of sites. I suggest heavily aliasing this with options like sleep intervals, aria2, and make sure you download the user agent switcher. For YouTube you probably need to import cookies from a browser. But you'll be able to watch the videos without the ads. Btrfs: it's a file system, like ext4 or ntfs. Has a lot of useful things like being able to create subvolumes, raid, cache drives (or volumes), quotas, snapshots, etc. Think anything that you'd do with zfs but it's been easier to use and it has a copy on write system that helps dedupe. You can also compress the file system! I use duperemover. If it finds dupes it replaces one file with a link (which btrfs natively supports). It'll hash the files so run it early and then set up a job (use a systemd timer) Tailscale: take your network anywhere. God, tailscale is so fucking useful. You can even put it on a raspberry pi or your phones. It's nice to have it on an old phone which you can throw termux on and have a little server. I've used these to jump to another machine that has had issues where it could connect locally but not outside. You can also set up exit nodes so you can do things like push all your traffic through a vpn, make all your traffic use pihole, or just make it appear like you're somewhere else. You could use this to even make it effectively impossible for streaming services to know you're sharing an account. The data is going through whoever's house pays. If you get fancy you can set up rules to port specific traffic through specific locations but this is still a bit above my head. I just know it's possible. Unfortunately with iPhones you have less control. They can even break out of all this and you don't have full control. I need to get someone to explain more networking to me. Systemd: it's annoying at first but damn there's so much to it that is helpful. Use systemctl edit to edit your service files. The ones that come with services like jellyfin aren't nearly as locked down as they should be (I intend to push to them in a few months). You should also use systemd mount for your drives. You need a companion automount file but your drives will go offline when not being used. This will really help with reducing energy costs. Be sure to note that there's even configs for you gpus. It also lets you control a systems resources. There's also nspawn and vmspawn. I wish these were a bit more popular because they can do everything docker can and more. Nspawn is a suped up chroot so you can really containerize things and even run different Linux flavors (I've even been play around with running an arm container on my x86 machine). Using machinectl you can enable these as services and even create triggers to spin up or down. There's also importctl so if you create an image (or someone else does) you can just pull that! Which kinda makes it easier than docker in many cases other than the fact that not many people have made images (or publicly available). Docker's big win is popularity but systemd has felt nicer in every other way (documentation sucks). There's so much more to systemd and that's why it's loved and hated. There's a reason it stuck, it just is too damn useful (don't forget to check out homectl too) Ffmpeg: you probably know this one but it's also worth spending some time to learn it more and write some scripts. If you care more about storage I encode most stuff to av1 with nvenc. It's not archival but honestly I'm often getting 50% storage reductions and I can't tell the difference. Your source file probably wasn't archival grade anyways. Good enough for me. Hevc is also giving me good success. There's a bunch of other little tools that help. For example, I have my main computer sitting behind my TV. If I'm working on it I'm in it via ssh. Otherwise games and movies are on the TV. I use ydotool as a keyboard and just made a shortcut on my iPhone and a trivial script on my Android so I can push commands that way and use a wireless mouse. There's kconnect but it's been more a hassle than help ime. I did the same for backing up photos on from my phones (they wake the drives first). Android can rsync but for iPhone I can't find a good free solution other than writing the hackiest shortcut you've seen (ssh in, check if file exists, if not then write. You can't rsync, the fucking thing will timeout and despite there being terminal emulators for iPhone you can't access your photos from them. I've found zero ways to link them and I'm upset). Check out things like fail2ban to jail users that do too many logins. You can also use nspawn to containerize these services, spin up and down, and between btrfs, homectl, and pam it is really easy to containerize users. You can mount their volumes on demand and get their accounts syncing across your intranet. It's kinda crazy what you can do. My goal is to get some images so many of these things can start becoming plug and play. I'm getting close but obviously bigger priorities right now. I'd love help if anyone is interested. I'm not an expert in these domains so I'm sure I'm doing some things wrong but I'm learning a ton

bane 1y ago

Unraid makes a lot of the home lab stuff pretty easy. There's a very active community, good docs, frequent updates. It costs a little, but it's one time and worth it, and can grow as you have time and money to add stuff to it.

udev4096 1y ago
You have to be extremely dumb to even think of using unraid. It introduces a hard dependency on whatever you do and is nothing more than a glorious wrapper for managing docker services
- bane 1y ago
  What dependency is that? Unraid is mostly used for storage management, the docker and vm parts are definitely side bits to the system.
  - udev4096 1y ago
    Yes, mostly storage. But why? Storage == ZFS. ZFS cli is well documented and works extremely well. Don't use unraid or truenas or any other fancy UI. I know the appeal from the beginners but it's not worth it
    - bane 1y ago
      You might be amazed to discover there's a an entire world of storage outside of ZFS.
      - MrDrMcCoy 1y ago
        You might be amazed to find there's a lot of good reasons the storage world moved away from the RAID4 model Unraid relies on. They're proprietary too, which isn't great if you care about recoverability or never being in a position where they can withdraw your license.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

smj-edison 1y ago

What do you do for backups? I'm just setting up an Emby instance with a 4 TB hard drive attached, but I'm worried it'll fail and take everything with it.

Semaphor 1y ago
Not OP, but I use a PI with attached SSD as a backup server, and then save that stuff to Backblaze B2 as additional cloud backup.
nickspacek 1y ago
Look into Backblaze B2. Use rclone, or another backup tool that has S3 compatibility (though B2 API has some additional bells and whistles). With rclone, you can also have a step to seamlessly encrypt the contents on the client side before sending to an external provider like B2. I chose B2 because it is the most affordable option, but rclone supports many backends.
- switch007 1y ago
  Rclone is a great tool but it is not really a complete backup tool. Ie no snapshots. You can use it to sync local snapshots or to a destination that does snapshots for example Borg/restic are more complete solutions
dharmab 1y ago
Amazon S3 Deep Archive and rclone for < 4-5TB. Backblaze in a Windows VM or container for 5TB+.
- electriclove 1y ago
  Do you have a write up on how to do these?
  - dharmab 1y ago
    No, I sat down for an evening and figured out rclone from their docs: https://rclone.org/docs/ https://rclone.org/docs/

russelg 1y ago

Is there a reason you went with Emby over Jellyfin (forked from Emby)?

chillfox 1y ago
Emby just felt more polished and focused while Jellyfin felt like it was on the path towards feature bloat. Also, I had more confidence in Emby supporting future devices I might get than Jellyfin. When it comes to supporting multiple media types (video/audiobooks/music/etc..) I prefer using a seperate solution for each that is focused on that use case instead of an all-in-one solution. I am using audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts, so I really don't need that from my video solution. I have configured Emby to keep the metadata in nfo files next to the videos, so I should be able to easily switch to something else if things change in the future.

artdigital 1y ago

I have my collection in Dropbox, then sync that onto my home server with rclone once a day, which exposes it to Plex. Then I use the Plexamp app (music-only Plex app) to listen across all my devices

Ziggy_Zaggy 1y ago

With all the SWE in the mix, why not just roll your own media player...? It's not THAT hard. Same for movie player btw (and one solution can do both ofc). HTML spec for media is pretty amazing these days, no real excuses outside of time.

solumunus 1y ago
Why roll your own media player? The reasons not to seem obvious.
TJSomething 1y ago
That's been sitting on my ideas list for over a decade, because I've wanted Pandora that runs locally from my collection. But I'm not sure I'll realistically ever get to it.
chillfox 1y ago
Time is pretty much the reason.

nadnad 1y ago

Would love to hear more details about your setup.

chillfox 1y ago
It's a pretty simple setup. I run Alpine Linux with ZFS, all apps are in docker containers managed with docker-compose, Caddy for reverse proxy, borgmatic/borg for backup, and some scripts managing zfs snapshots.

BrandoElFollito 1y ago

> The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling at this point I have a ~10 years old desktop as my server (intel skylake and 24GB of RAM). I host about 20 services and the server is not loaded at all. The services are the usual ones, nothing heavy such as LLMs, though

chillfox 1y ago
I have got 26 docker containers running on it. Looking at current utilization, it's 6% of cpu, 10GB ram out of 16gb. The issue is disk access. The thing has total shit bandwidth to storage, this was a surprise to me and a bit of a learning experience. It has an nvme ssd and a 3.5 hdd, but in the end usb drives attached to the usb 2 ports are much faster than either. It's a Lenovo, so I guess they cut costs somewhere and the usb 2 ports should have been a giveaway, but I was tricked by the nvme.

HexPhantom 1y ago

$150/month shaved off is no joke. It's funny how these subscriptions creep up until you're basically running a second rent in background services.

bambax 1y ago

Self hosting is absolutely awesome. I upgraded my NAS to a recent Asustor a year ago and it changed my life. JellyFin for video works perfectly everywhere in my home, on any device, and it can also be accessed remotely, securely, with Tailscale, so if I'm in a hotel somewhere with my iPad it still works. And my library is curated by me; it has classic movies and other movies I like, and zero fluff or random shows that I would never watch in a million years. But self hosting doesn't stop here. Using Docker (via Portainer) I can publish any app in minutes, on either Apache or Nginx, securely with a Cloudflare tunnel (free) without ever exposing my home IP to the world. This of course isn't as resilient as a proper server with a proper provider, but it's so much simpler and so much cheaper that for hobby projects it's largely good enough.

zaphodias 1y ago

I'm doing the same, I have family plans with my friends for pretty much anything so I don't think I ever reached such high monthly costs though. I started my home server for self hosting Immich, not only for the cost but because I like to have my images close to me. I also recently replaced Lightroom with ON1, it's definitely not the same quality but, as hobbyist, it didn't make much sense to pay that much for me anymore. It was by far the most expensive subscription I had.

lhamil64 1y ago

Where do you get media from? Piracy is an option, but if you want to do it semi-legally I guess you’d need to rip blu-rays, but that seems like it'd be more expensive than streaming services, and you’d have to wait for everything to be released on blu-ray (if it even does)

chillfox 1y ago
I have a large dvd collection from before streaming was really a thing, but yeah I just get blu-rays of the movies I really like. Most of the movies I watch is ones I have already watched. I was really only watching 1-2 movies a month that were new to me with streaming, and few of them were actually new releases.