I’ve been using nginx forever. It works, I can do almost everything I want, even if more complex things sometimes require some contortions. I’m not sure I would pick it again if starting from scratch, but I have no problems that are worth switching for.

#1 items should be backups. (Well maybe #2 so that you have something to back up, but don’t delete the source data until the backups are running.)

You need offsite backups, and ideally multiple locations.

IMHO Arch is actually a great choice. They do have a minimum update frequency you need to maintain (I don’t recall exactly, I think it is somewhere between 1 and 3 months) but if you do, and read the news before updates (and you are usually fine if you don’t, usually the update will just refuse to run until you intervene) things are pretty seamless. I had many arch machines running for >5 years with no issues and no reason to expect that it would change. This is many major version updates for other distros which are often not as seamless.

That being said I am on NixOS now which takes this to the next level, I am running nixos-unstable but thanks to the way NixOS is structured I don’t need to worry about any legacy cruft accumulating from the many years of updates.

And after all of that I don’t think it really matters. I think any major distro you pick, weather stable, release-based or LTS will be fine. They all have some sort of update path these days. (unlike in the past where some distros just recommended a re-install for major updates).

That’s true. And I’m not saying B2 is bad, it is just something that you should be aware of.

Their automatic replication isn’t quite as seamless as GCS or S3 though. For example deletes aren’t replicated so you will need a cleanup strategy. Plus once you 2x or 3x the price B2 isn’t as competitive on price. My point is that it is very easy to compare apples to oranges looking at cloud storage providers and it is important to be aware.

For me B2 is a great fit and I am happy with it, but I don’t wan to mislead peope.

I think it depends on your needs. IIUC their storage is “single location”. Like a very significant natural disaster could take it offline or maybe even lose it. Something like S3 or Google Cloud Storage (depending on which durability you select) is multi-location (as in significantly distinct geographical regions). So still very likely that you will never lose any data, but in the extreme cases potentially you could.

If I was storing my only copy of something it would matter a lot more (although even then you are best to store with multiple providers for social reasons, not just technical) but for a backup it is fine.

I’ve been using Restic to Backblaze B2.

I don’t really trust B2 that much (I think it is mostly a single-DC kind of storage) but it is reasonably priced and easy to use. Plus as long as their failures aren’t correlated with mine it should be fine.

I switched to Immich recently and am very happy.

1. Immich’s face detection is much better, very rarely fails. Especially for non-white faces. But even for white faces PhotoPrisim regularly needed me reviewing the unmatched faces. I also needed to really turn up the “what is a face” threshold because otherwise it would miss a ton of clear faces. (Then it only missed some, but also has tons of false positives). On the other hand Immich just works.
2. Immich’s UI is much nicer overall. Lots of small affordances. For example the menu item to “view in timeline” is worth switching alone. Also good riddance to PhotoPrism’s persistent and buggy selection. Someone must have worked really hard on implementing this but it was really just a bad idea.
3. Immich has an app with uploading, and it allows you to view local and uploaded photos in one interface which is a huge UX win. I couldn’t find a good Android app for uploading to photoprism. You could set up import delays and stuff but you would still regularly get partially uploaded files imported and have to clean it up manually.
4. Immich’s search by content is much better. For example searching for “cat with red and yellow ball” was useless on PhotoPrism, but I found tons of the results I was looking for on Immich.

The bad:

1. There is currently a terrible jank in the Immich app which makes videos unusable and everything painful. Apparently this is due to some Album sync process running in the main thread. They are working on it. I can’t fathom how a few hundred albums causes this much lag but 🤷 There is also even worse lag on the location view page, but at least that is just one page.
2. The Immich app has a lot less features than the website. But the website works very well on mobile so even just using the website (and the app for uploading) is better than PhotoPrism here. The fundamentals are good but it just needs more work.
3. I liked PhotoPrism’s advanced filters. They were very limited but at least they were there.
4. Not being able to sort search results by date is a huge usability issue. I often know roughly when the photo I want to find was taken and being able to order by date would be hugely helpful.
5. You have to eagerly transcode all videos. There is no way to clean up old transcodes and re-transcode on the fly. To be fair the PhotoPrism story also wasn’t great because you had to wait for the full video to be transcoded before starting, leading to a huge delay for videos more than a few seconds, but at least I could save a few hundred gigs of disk space.

Honestly a lot of stuff in PhotoPrism feels like one developer has a weird workflow and they optimized it for that. Most of them are counter to what I actually want to do (like automatic title and description generation, or the review stuff, or auto quality rating). Immich is very clearly inspired by Google Photos and takes a lot of things directly from it, but that matches my use case way better. (I was pretty happy with Google Photos until they started refusing to give access to the originals.)

Most Intel GPUs are great at transcoding. Reliable, widely supported and quite a bit of transcoding power for very little electrical power.

I think the main thing I would check is what formats are supported. If the other GPU can support newer formats like AV1 it may be worth it (if you want to store your videos in these more efficient formats or you have clients who can consume these formats and will appreciate the reduced bandwidth).

But overall I would say if you aren’t having any problems no need to bother. The onboard graphics are simple and efficient.

Yet another service to maintain. If the server is crashing you can’t log in, so you need backup UNIX users anyways.

Oh, flac fixes for HLS. I wonder if https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/8722 was fixed. I’ll have to try it out today.

Two regions of one provider isn’t really a reliable backup. What if the provider goes out of business, hacked, closes your account or has a software bug that affects all of their storage.

I also had a bad experience where I had a test website under a megabyte in a storage bucket. It was under the free tier and sat there for a few years. Then one month they sent me a bill (it was small, a handful of cents). Contact support saying that this use is under the free tier. They said that data was added then removed from the bucket. I hadn’t logged into the account, no living API keys. They wouldn’t forgive the charge.

Luckily my credit card had expired so they just locked my account.

If you haven’t used any configuration management before it would definitely be valuable to learn.

However I would also recommend trying Nix and NixOS. The provide much better reproducibility. For example using Ansible-like tools I would always have issues where I create a file, then remove the code to create the file but the file still exists or the server is still running. I wrote a post going into more detail about the difference a while ago https://kevincox.ca/2015/12/13/nixos-managed-system/. However this is more involved. If you already have a running server it will be a big shift, instead of just slowly starting to manage things via Ansible.

But I would definitely consider using something. Having configuration managed and versioned with history is super valuable.

If they can shove ads into the GMail UI I’m sure they could have found a place to put them in Google Reader.

Video serving is a very sequential workload so hard drives will be more than sufficient and you can typically get storage at a lower price.

SSD may give you slightly faster start and seeking but it is unlikely to be noticeable.

If you want to serve multiple resolutions and bitrates you will probably want hardware that can do transcoding. However basically any graphics card (even integrated) will be able to transcode a video stream in real-time at a decent quality.

(If you wanted you can try to pre-transcode offline, but Jellyfin doesn’t support this well)

Although getting something that supports AV1 hardware decoding could be forward thinking. For now you are probably fine without it and if you are ripping DVDs you may consider just keeping the original encoding. But most likely you will start to see more AV1 files coming in the future, and having a server that can transcode AV1 to older formats easily will keep everything on your network working properly.

Currently s1 and t6. I’m not a fun person.

Element is running a beta for Video Rooms which is basically exactly this. However it isn’t standardized yet and I haven’t tried it.

I ended up creating my own because I couldn’t find something that did what I want a few years ago when I started looking. My main requirement was easy scaling of ingredients. It has a handful of features around that such as scaling by specifying servings, scaling by setting the amount of a particular ingredient (example making pancakes with leftover buttermilk, pour the buttermilk into the bowl then scale the recipe based on how much was left) and ingredient conversion. In most other ways it is pretty basic and free-form but it does the job. It stores data in a user-provided provider so other people never send me their recipes.

https://recipes.kevincox.ca/