I kinda like flatpaks being an option, not sure when they are the only option though.

I would get a Nokia flip phone but they cost a bit. Cheaper to get something someone is throwing out

2TB? How!

Currently sat on 5GB across 920 files

I like using rygel currently, just run it by command line and media folders are available over the network. Any device with VLC can see it on the network and play.

I have been using rygel. I don’t need anything fancy, dump a few media folders onto any VLC player on the LAN.

60w is like £120 a year, these costs add up to the point that low spec servers pretty much always cost more in energy than hardware. Of course it also depends on where you live and your energy rates.

You could buy a 20 year old server that is going to use 800w, or you could buy a mini PC that is probably more powerful and uses like 10-20w.

Then again, I used to live somewhere that energy was included in the rent so short of starting a bitcoin farm usage wouldn’t really get noticed too much. In that case it would make sense to just go cheap hardware.

Your energy is clearly a lot cheaper than mine then.

Oh I am not saying specifically get a raspberry pi, personally looking at a bee-link N150 mini PC. It isn’t even that much more expensive than the 16GB raspberry pi and as its x86 I can just run normal debian installs in proxmox.

Power consumption is a massive reason to really not do that. Its cheap for a reason, its takes a shitload of power to be shit and you will pay more in energy than you save in hardware unless its only powered on for short periods of time - a server typically isn’t.

This is actually something that applies to cheap products too. Was in Asda a little while ago and saw 2 LED bulbs with the same lumen rating. Cheaper one used 3w more and you only saved £1. Running it for 8 hours a day for a year would cost double that saving in electricity. For a server you are looking at almost £2 per watt each year. Does that ewaste look so good to you now?

Some things are absolutely worth getting second hand, but you really should be careful considering the power cost as well.

Quick edit: If you don’t need it running 24/7, consider something like AWS too. I love selfhosting but if its not running much it might be cheaper to not bother buying hardware.

If I ever have a kid they will be the one that has friends over for Minecraft LAN parties.

I used to run servers a decade ago and open was fine. Never had a random join. Crazy to think bots are trying random IPs now, probably would whitelist in that case

I am sometimes surprised to find new things VLC can do, it’s awesome.

We don’t even care about customers going way over their license until they give us a reason to. You pay for 500 users, you have 2000 and are using the platform as a barely compressed 4k video hosting service which it really isn’t designed for. Then you also complain about performance?

Homestly if they didn’t act so shitty when raising a support ticket over it we probably would have continued to not care about it. Being a dick about it though and we will look for any reason to tell you to fuck off.

I still remember sticking files on an apache server and openly sharing that with friends. Not had a need to do that lately but I can always start doing it again if necessary.

Certainly could, depends what exactly you want to run and the specs of the machine of course. Something to keep in mind though is if its very old it may cost more in electricity than a fairly cheap new machine. But really it depends on your use case.

A lot of self hosted things have fairly low requirements but not all of them.

It has been a long time since I ran MC servers, you could do all of that with self hosting though. I still remember around 2011 running a server at school with a PC we found in a skip. Glorious 750MB of RAM! It ran alright though for a room full of people.

Its been a long time since I played, wouldn’t the best protection from that just be not broadcasting the server to the open internet? Never had an issue with servers that were technically fully open but only telling friends about it. I suppose whitelist is better than security through obscurity though.

I had to transfer files over Bluetooth to a Windows PC. Fuck that is terrible compared to doing it on my Linux PC.

Oh? What did he do

Considering moving my stuff into a VirtualBox VM or two rather than running directly on my PC. Then at some point in the future when I have the hardware for it I can fairly easily move it to proxmox. Also means installing a clean OS on my main PC is a quicker task as it would just be install virtual box, load up the VMs and a lot of stuff would already be done.