Nvidia Shield. The regular version is $150 US and from what I understand it gives flawless playback. I have the pro version which is more powerful, but that’s specifically for running games.
It’s Android TV OS, so app selection is great. You can load Smart Tube Next on there to get YouTube without ads, and there’s a very solid Jellyfin app. You can also use Kodi for local direct playback. Remote is perfectly functional, and you can use an app to rebind most of the keys.
This is the selfhosted community; Who are you training? In most cases there’s literally only one person who would ever need SSH access to this server. Maybe two or three in a tiny handful of cases, but anyone who can’t figure out Netbird in 30 seconds absolutely should not be accessing anything via SSH.
And you’ve clearly never used Netbird, Tailscale, or any similar service, if you think that update, maintenance and config constitute any kind of meaningful burden, especially for something as simple as remote access to a VPS.
We’re in selfhosted. If you have to bring up use cases that are in no way relevant to 99% of self hosters to justify your argument, you don’t have an argument.
A lot of things are “fine”, but the cost of adding Netbird to your VPS is effectively zero, whether counted in dollars, time, or convenience.
Given the massive security benefits of using a VPN, and the lack of any meaningful downside to doing so, you’d be an idiot not to.
And mine. Clearly one of us is better at it.
You seem like a fan of the “pull out” method.
This is the correct answer. Never expose your SSH port on the public web, always use a VPN. Tailscale, Netmaker or Netbird make it piss easy to connect to your VPS securely, and because they all use NAT traversal you don’t have to open any ports in your firewall.
Combine this with configuring UFW on the server (in addition to the firewall from the VPS provider - layered defence is king) and Fail2Ban. SSH keys are also a good idea. And of course disable root SSH just in case.
With a multi-layered defence like this you will be functionally impervious to brute force attacks. And while each layer of protection may have an undiscovered exploit, it will be unlikely that there are exploits to bypass every layer simultaneously (Note for the pendants; I said “unlikely”, not “impossible”. No defence is perfect).
Yeah, the potential for real hazard to life and limb is very high here. This isn’t like fucking around with your IOT lightbulbs. This could kill somebody.
Calibre can also be a server. And you can still put DRM free books on your Kobo device.
I’ve also been comparing Element and Revolt. Both seem really solid, both are open source and both are self-hostable. Hard to find any downsides there.
There’s a discord server that me and a bunch of friends use as our main hangout. They’ve raised the prospect of bailing before things enshittify, and of course I’ve been tasked with pitching a replacement. For my money, Revolt is the way I’m going to go, specifically because it’s basically a one for one clone of Discord. The people I’m pitching this to are a mix of technical and non-technical, so I think something that looks and feels like what they’re used to will be the easiest transition.
It also feels like Element is geared pretty heavily towards being a replacement for Slack / Teams rather than a replacement for Discord. Their pitch seems a lot more focused on the enterprise market. Revolt seems more focused on gaming, casual hangout, that sort of thing.
I like Element a lot, but for me it doesn’t feel like the right solution to this specific problem. But if I was pitching something to my work as a Teams replacement, Element is definitely the way I’d go.
I use a couple of old HP proliant mini towers. Relatively low power consumption, i7 CPUs and 32GB of RAM. I got mine from ewaste but it’s the sort of thing you can easily find refurbed for the price of a high end Raspberry Pi.
I’ve never had any luck finding anything open source / self hosted that actually works reliably. The best I came up with was an Nvidia Shield, which at least allows to you to run stuff like Kodi, Jellyfin, and Smart Tube Next (ad blocking YouTube client).
If you’re looking for a good Nextcloud replacement I recommend Seafile. Been using it for years, very solid.
So, unfortunately, this latest update seems to have created a lot of issues. First off, MobaXTerm support appears to be borked. Second, attempting to connect directly to LXC containers throws an error because I haven’t linked a WSL2 instance for X11, even though X forwarding is not enabled for the connection.
I’d suggest maybe testing with a plain Debian or Fedora install. Just enable KVM and install virt-manager, and create the environment that way.
Unfortunately I’m not very familiar with Cloudstack or Proxmox; we’ve always worked with KVM using virt-manager and Cockpit.
Our usual method is to remove the default hard drive, reattach the qcow file as a SCSI device, and then we modify the SCSI controller that gets created to enable queuing. I’m sure at some point I should learn to do all this through the command line, but it’s never really been relevant to do so.
The relevant sections look like this in one our prod VMs:
<disk type='file' device='disk'>
<driver name='qemu' type='qcow2'/>
<source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images/XXX.qcow2' index='1'/>
<backingStore/>
<target dev='sdb' bus='scsi'/>
<alias name='scsi0-0-0-1'/>
<address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' target='0' unit='1'/>
</disk>
<controller type='scsi' index='0' model='virtio-scsi'>
<driver queues='6'/>
<alias name='scsi0'/>
<address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x04' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
</controller>
The driver queues=‘X’ line is the part you have to add. The number should equal the number of cores assigned to the VM.
See the following for more on tuning KVM:
What are your disk settings for the KVM environments? We use KVM at work and found that the default configuration loses you a lot of performance on disk operations.
Switching from SATA to SCSI driver, and then enabling queues (set the number equal to your number of cores) dramatically speeds up all disk operations, large and small.
On mobile right now but I’ll try to add some links to the KVM docs later.
Been using Xpipe for probably over a year now. It’s amazing and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
I just use a DDNS updater. That’s honestly good enough for most purposes.
Alternatively, you could use a service like Zerotier, Tailscale or Netbird to create a virtual private LAN connection to a free Oracle VPS, then route the traffic from the VPN to your home network.
I’ve been running Seafile for over ten years. They released version 12.0 just last month. I’m really not sure why people have this impression that it’s not maintained.
Seafile updates slowly because it’s very much intended as an enterprise product. It has minimal bells and whistles, but the core functionality is reliable and works well. It’s more of a BlackBerry than an iPhone.
In the side by side tests I’ve seen it syncs a lot faster than Nextcloud. I keep my entire documents, downloads and picture folders synced there across three different machines, nearly 300GB of data in total, and I can wipe my laptop and sync all my files back in under and hour. File transfers basically cap out at network speed, even with large numbers of small files. I’ve used the desktop client, the drive client and the mobile client and never had any complaints with any of them.
Sidenote, if you create an account on their site they’ll give you a pro license for up to three users, free forever.
The documentation is a bit of a beast, but worth reading thoroughly. Setup is a little fiddly compared to Nextcloud (that’s a major turn off for a lot of people, understandably so). If you have questions message me and I’ll try to help. If you go with the free pro license, be sure to enable offline garbage collection, it’ll help keep your storage use under control.
Anyway, I really like it, works well for me. Definitely worth trying out.