Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Wes: My name is Wes.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Hey, gents. Well, coming up on the show this week, I have finally cracked it.
Chris: I love Jellyfin, but there's been one thing that's been lacking that's kept Plex around.
Chris: Well, I have a wild remote access trick for private self-hosted services like Jellyfin.
Chris: And now I can share my Jellyfin instance with friends and family who can't join my Mesh network.
Chris: It's simple, It's absurd, and it's shockingly effective.
Chris: And then we'll round it out with some great picks, some boosts, and more.
Chris: So before we get into all of that, we've got to give a shout-out to our virtual
Chris: lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Time-appropriate greetings.
Mumble: Hello. Hey, Chris. Hey, Wes. And hello, Brent.
Chris: Hey, guys. Hello up there in the quiet listening tune. I see a little crew up
Chris: there hanging out with us.
Chris: Mumble Room is always rolling. JupyterBroadcasting.com slash mumble.
Chris: And a big good morning to our friends at Defined Networking.
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Chris: security and decentralization from the very beginning.
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Chris: All right, we have decided to do it. The Great Holiday Home Lab is coming up.
Chris: Pay attention because we're going to need you to submit your home lab to this special.
Chris: And I will have links. I'll have all of it set up for you.
Chris: It's something we're doing in place of the tuxies this year.
Chris: It's our first, very first edition of the Great Holiday Home Lab special.
Chris: And we want to see your setups. It's a magical time of year.
Chris: It'll be coming up before you know it. It's just a couple of weeks away.
Chris: So it is our first community showdown of your questionable wiring your crazy
Chris: tinkering uh maybe your downright impressive builds i don't know maybe you got
Chris: a real clean setup i want you to enter your home lab big or small to linuxunplugged.com slash holiday.
Chris: And it is a Google form.
Chris: Don't think you have to log in, but if you hate Google forms,
Chris: I have a solution for you. It's all available. You can just copy and post into an email.
Chris: Go to linuxunplugged.com slash old fart.
Chris: That's linuxunplugged.com slash old fart. If you just want the markdown version,
Chris: I'd like you to submit a couple of photos, a short description,
Chris: your hardware list, and tell us what your home lab actually does.
Chris: And then you're in. And we're going to have a couple of different categories
Chris: we're going to have the grand rack award which will be 100 000 sats
Chris: we'll have the silver pseudo award which will be 50 000 sats the best effort
Chris: award he doesn't have to be perfect the best effort 10 000 sats and then the
Chris: lup rescue mission one home lab that's in such bad shape maybe you tried a lot
Chris: of heart went into that home lab a lot of effort,
Chris: The three of us, the boys, we're going to get connected on a remote call.
Chris: We're going to run down what's going on. We're going to help you get things
Chris: in working order and do a little LUP rescue mission, for better or for worse.
Brent: I feel like you're talking about my home lab here. Oh, wait,
Brent: we've already done that rescue multiple times. What's going on?
Wes: Why won't that stick?
Chris: You know, it's like the shoemaker whose kids have horrible shoes.
Chris: So, you know, we're probably going to record that session.
Chris: And depending on how it goes, we may turn that into an episode as well.
Chris: If you end up on the LUP rescue mission tier.
Chris: So we're going to have each home lab, we're going to look at its functionality,
Chris: your design, your ingenuity, your creativity.
Chris: Efficiency is a big one too. If you have documentation, that'll matter.
Chris: Your personality, your creative solutions you've come up with.
Chris: We're going to have a zero to 10 per category score. Each one of us will give scores.
Chris: You know, we'll have things like the lowest functionality, but best personality.
Chris: Maybe a disaster story might earn the rescue, something like that.
Chris: So the entries are open right now. I want you to submit your homelab,
Chris: show us what you got, even if it's totally chaotic.
Chris: Hey, my wiring often looks horrible.
Chris: No shame in that. We may judge you and call you out for it, but don't worry.
Chris: A lot of us have it like that.
Chris: We really want to see what you got. So submit it. We'll have links in the show notes.
Chris: And again, it's linuxunplugged.com slash holiday or linuxunplugged.com slash
Chris: old fart for the great holiday homelab extravaganza.
Chris: And do get them in quick, because we're going to be recording our holiday episodes
Chris: before you know it. And I can't wait to see what you guys have come up with.
Chris: We cannot participate ourselves, unfortunately. We'll have to do our own rescues later on our own.
Brent: Been disqualified already. Jeez.
Chris: Okay, so I wanted to solve something that's really kind of been eating at me
Chris: since about two years ago when Alex and I did the Jellyfin January Challenge, I think it was.
Chris: And it'll be two years, I think, this January. And Jellyfin's been fantastic.
Chris: The migration to Plex was really smooth.
Chris: I use infuse on an Apple TV, which sounds like a, why would you do that kind of setup?
Chris: But it actually, after trying all the things really has been just a fantastic
Chris: way to consume media really flawless.
Chris: The two combination are great. And I do take advantage of some jellyfin plugins
Chris: and I use the jellyfin web interface from time to time.
Chris: I've had to keep one Plex instance around because friends and family like to
Chris: sometimes check in on the old media library.
Chris: Maybe they're traveling or whatever, and Plex is installed on a lot of stuff,
Chris: or it's easy to get going on anything that has a web browser.
Chris: And so once or twice a week, friends or family are streaming things from a Plex
Chris: server that I don't actually use for myself.
Chris: And I thought about this problem because when you're at a hotel or,
Chris: you know, it's a friend's computer, you don't necessarily want them to just
Chris: randomly join your mesh network.
Chris: And I don't necessarily just want to build a public Jellyfin server that's available
Chris: on a VPS all the time that's going to get banged on.
Chris: And I don't want to have my ports forwarded on my firewall permanently to my Jellyfin instance.
Chris: And I might want to solve this for other self-hosted software that isn't Jellyfin.
Chris: And so this is a problem that I have tried to figure out for quite a while.
Chris: And obviously something Plex handles really well.
Chris: I know neither one of us none of us are really big Plex users but occasionally,
Chris: you know we might dip in just because of the share feature.
Wes: Yeah absolutely and it's one of those things right where you just kind of got
Wes: maybe folks who were less technical still kind of had a Plex account because
Wes: they had other friends who were sharing Plex just there was a lot of stuff that
Wes: ended up meaning you could get tangentially sucked in and that meant that it
Wes: was also very easy to take advantage of them doing sort of hey,
Wes: we're the SaaS company that's willing to do free proxying for you and host the auth and make it easy.
Brent: Wes, you've had a really nice solution to this that you've used historically.
Brent: I know I've used it a couple of times.
Chris: What, his randomly spin up a jellyfin server, watch a TV show and then destroy it move?
Brent: Quite on demand too. I think you've optimized it as well.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I did think about this.
Wes: I have a tip. I'm later in the show. I have a tip for how to do this.
Wes: I haven't adopted yet, but that's even better.
Chris: I wanted something that would let us continue to watch the TV shows that we've been watching.
Chris: Like right now, we're watching the first season of Mary Tyler Moore while we eat dinner.
Chris: And if we go out somewhere that has an internet connection on a web browser,
Chris: I would like to be able to stream my Jellyfin instance.
Chris: And so ideally, I wanted to set up with no special VPN required,
Chris: no weird stuff for the user to do, no weird stuff for me to have to do.
Chris: And there's a lot of ways to crack this. And we're going to talk about some after I tell you mine.
Chris: And if you have Tailscale, for example, you could use a Tailscale funnel.
Chris: If you're a pretty big Cloudflare user, you could probably use a Cloudflare tunnel.
Chris: But I wanted to try solving this with something I've never used before but I've
Chris: heard a lot about, and it's a service called Ngrok.
Chris: And it looks pretty straightforward. That's one of the things that appealed to me.
Chris: And it's a self-hosted sort of ingress as a service or a secure tunneling platform on demand.
Chris: And you do run a small agent on your box, and it opens up the outbound connection
Chris: to ngrok's cloud, and then ngrok generates a public URL that forwards traffic
Chris: back to your local service, whatever you might be pointing it at.
Chris: And it also, very conveniently...
Chris: It handles the HTTPS certs. So if you're using it for free, you can use three
Chris: online endpoints and a gigabyte of bandwidth and 20,000 HTTPS requests a month.
Chris: And then they have paid tiers that start around $8 or $5 a month that give you more.
Wes: And that's particularly convenient for a Jellyfin, right?
Wes: Just because not every app, but some combos of certain apps really prefer your
Wes: Jellyfin server to have a TLS certificate.
Wes: Yes. Even if you don't really need one or you don't even care because you're
Wes: just trying to stream media that isn't secret at all, but.
Chris: Yeah, a lot of the mobile apps and a lot of the basic kiosk web browsers,
Chris: which was one of the things that was a requirement is this would work on a basic
Chris: Chromium kiosk browser.
Wes: Also helps for some casting situations if you're going that route.
Chris: Mm, yeah, right, of course. So that was something that I wanted to try,
Chris: but I also needed a way to toggle this on and off because I don't want to leave
Chris: it running when I'm not personally watching TV.
Chris: And this proposes an interesting challenge because a situation we find ourselves
Chris: in, we're at an Airbnb or a hotel and we want to watch some Star Trek.
Chris: I don't want to have to SSH in or I want to be able to toggle it on really quick
Chris: or my wife. I want my wife to be able to do it as well.
Wes: Right. You wanted something where you didn't have to like go manually stand
Wes: up infrastructure or wire stuff together, like not have to set it up with an
Wes: intention before like a big trip. You want to be able to like on a whim on a Saturday.
Chris: Yeah, I didn't I don't want to have my jellyfin server on the public Internet
Chris: all the time, you know, so something I could easily toggle on and off remotely.
Chris: It was really kind of what I was going for.
Brent: So this still feels like you're exposing yourself to the public internet, really.
Brent: Because if you didn't feel like there was some kind of risk,
Brent: you wouldn't need the toggle, right? You just leave it on all the time.
Brent: So does this feel like the ultimate solution or just a step towards?
Chris: Yeah, you're right. I mean, it is still a problem. I mean, it's a really crazy
Chris: ngrok URL, so there's a little bit of obscurity there.
Chris: But then, of course, I do the right thing. And I have a DNS redirect that makes
Chris: it a really simple URL. so that way I don't have to type a crazy NGROC URL into
Chris: a kiosk device, which probably makes it easier to discover.
Chris: This is something I'd be curious to know what solutions I could employ at this stage.
Chris: I could do IP whitelisting, but the issue there is I don't know what IP I'm
Chris: connecting from. It could be cellular network.
Wes: Yeah, and you won't if you're at a random Airbnb or hotel or wherever your cell
Wes: phone gets assigned today.
Brent: And if it was just you, you would use your mesh network, right?
Brent: That's the obvious solution here.
Chris: But yeah do.
Brent: You want to let wes and i connect whenever we want to or whenever we can convince
Brent: you to flick the switch right.
Chris: Yeah it's so that that is i think the
Chris: downside to this setup is for for a period of time there is a way public internet
Chris: could discover your jellyfin server now the way ngrok works is when you go to
Chris: the url at least on the free tier there's a page you have to go through first
Chris: to say yeah i know what i'm doing so that might slow down some automation i I doubt it, though.
Chris: Ultimately, what I rely on is keeping my Jellyfin server secure and up-to-date and isolated still.
Wes: Yeah, I was going to say, like, obviously defense in depth, but there's also,
Wes: you should be realistic about what your actual particular threat scenarios are,
Wes: and, you know, how do you, does your Jellyfin have, uh, is it all just guest accounts and, um...
Wes: Default passwords uh is it does it have access to the rest of your box or is
Wes: it in some sort of container or virtual machine or thing that just has access
Wes: to the media and do you have sensitive stuff in your media or are all things
Wes: to yeah that may make you care more or less depending on
Wes: how you've got it set up if it's just like a dedicated virtual machine that
Wes: only has like a limited stuff mounted in from the host maybe it's not a huge
Wes: deal if it's you know running on your box where you also do all of your backups
Wes: and stuff then maybe it's a bigger deal.
Chris: It does seem like in terms of application complexity because it is a very complex
Chris: application with a lot of stuff under the hood, a lot of FFmpeg,
Chris: and it has access to hardware acceleration.
Chris: You know, of the apps, I'm going to make temporarily public.
Chris: It feels like maybe the dumbest one to actually make temporary public because
Chris: there's, honestly, there's a large attack service, there may be auth bypasses
Chris: for all I know, ways to trigger the server to do all kinds of crazy DDoS indexing
Chris: and transcoding. I mean, who knows? Right.
Chris: I mean, it has to be something you consider in the setup, I think,
Chris: which is why the toggle I felt like was so important, because then I'm at least,
Chris: you know, I'm watching a half hour episode of Mary Tyler Moore.
Chris: Or, okay, so I have a 40-minute window where I have this really crazy obscure URL and all of that.
Chris: But something I would really like input on is layers of protection I could do
Chris: here or some other maybe second-order authentication I could do to enable this,
Chris: to authorize certain connections.
Chris: Like if you have any ideas to boost in or give me a little bit of feedback on
Chris: this because that is something that is not ideal and I do want to disclose it's a risk here.
Chris: But ultimately, I was very, very happy with the setup that I ended up with.
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Brent: Well, you mentioned wanting to be able to turn this on and off,
Brent: I'm assuming from the sofa or any sofa in Airbnb or at home and have the wife
Brent: be able to do it, which is,
Brent: it sounds like quite a challenge, Chris, but you said this, you pulled this
Brent: off in a nice way. So I'm waiting to see. What do you got?
Chris: You know, as the years go by...
Chris: My go-to solution more and more for this type of stuff is make a button in Home Assistant for it.
Chris: It's such a flexible, powerful platform.
Brent: Should have guessed.
Chris: Yeah, it works great for this kind of thing.
Wes: And, I mean, maybe not for everyone, but you are already committed to having
Wes: it available and plumbed to basically all of your devices, right? You want that.
Wes: So you're not paying a cost for like a new separate whole, you know,
Wes: bookmark and a whole bunch of stuff.
Chris: True. And it's something I'm already maintaining and making sure it's highly
Chris: available and et cetera.
Chris: But also the thing that played a big factor in my decision making is it's on
Chris: the wife's phone, right?
Chris: The kids know how to use it. So it already has family workflow.
Chris: So I'm adding a button to a thing they're already using. I'm not asking them to go use a new thing.
Chris: And I cannot tell you what a difference that makes in family adoption.
Chris: It's the difference between them using it and not using them.
Chris: So plus it's just really awesome. I wanted a small little button,
Chris: and I already have a dashboard that's for our media playback that has a mock
Chris: remote control, and it has our music assistant controls.
Chris: You can control the different speakers in the house from this one dashboard
Chris: already. So this is where you already go to do TV stuff.
Wes: I'm almost imagining like you have a TV button on the wall that you hit,
Wes: you know, and then it starts the TV up, and then the TV turns on,
Wes: and then the switch is toggled, and you're ready to go.
Chris: Well, I absolutely could. I absolutely could map it to a button,
Chris: right? I could conceivably even map it to just a hardware button that I take with me in my bag.
Wes: Or for the kids, it has a little countdown, and then the button turns red again, and the TV's cut off.
Chris: Yeah, the tunnel turns, yeah.
Brent: I would like to know what you called the device in Home Assistant.
Brent: You probably came up with a good name, or you need a better name, right?
Chris: No, it's just, well, yes, I do. It's just Jellyfin Tunnel.
Brent: Lame.
Chris: Maybe it could be like Media Conduit. I don't know.
Chris: I like that. I tend to give Star Trek names, because then it sticks out.
Chris: You know, like, you know, like media subspace relay subspace media relay,
Chris: something like that could work.
Chris: But the other thing, too, that I didn't want to have to deal with is I didn't
Chris: want to have to do the crazy Ngrok URL every time because I'm not going to remember that.
Chris: And I'm picturing like an Airbnb. I'm picturing a kiosk.
Chris: I'm picturing a basic web browser. Or I'm telling a family member over the phone.
Chris: And I don't want to have to give them this crazy URL.
Chris: So when I hit this button, not only do I want the tunnel to initiate on a different
Chris: box, but then I also want to retrieve the crazy rando Ngrok URL I just got.
Chris: And then I want to go update my Cloudflare DNS entry with a redirect to point
Chris: a static DNS name at this new crazy URL.
Chris: And all of that happens with a push of a button.
Chris: And it's so great. And honestly, it was really made possible because I created
Chris: a little REST API with a tiny little Python server.
Chris: I vibe coded. I'll just admit that.
Wes: Oh, yeah.
Chris: Very simple. It's only got like
Chris: four functions. So it's not like it's very powerful or very complicated.
Chris: But what it does is it listens for essentially an HTTP rest request from Home Assistant.
Chris: And that either tells it to start, stop, or check the status or get the URL.
Chris: So in Home Assistant, I can show if the tunnel is active. I can light the button
Chris: up when the tunnel is up or down.
Chris: And I have history of how long the tunnel's been active, when it was activated,
Chris: and I can also display the ngrok URL in Home Assistant if I wanted to.
Wes: Ooh, that's nice.
Chris: Yeah. That's really, really fantastic. I did play around with Cloudflare because
Chris: they don't have the bandwidth limitations until you go too far.
Chris: And because I'm hosting the DNS on Cloudflare, it kind of made sense to just do it all in one place.
Chris: But honestly, the complexity is more significant. And so, and I've just found
Chris: Ngrok to work really well.
Chris: And then in Home Assistant, I created a manual REST sensor.
Chris: And it's just something you add to the Home Assistant config.yaml file.
Chris: And it's probably five lines of YAML.
Chris: And it just identifies a new sensor type.
Chris: And I give it the URLs for the sensor endpoints to go talk to the Python server.
Chris: And then that's how it triggers and reads the state.
Chris: And while it sounds kind of like hacking a bunch of scripts together,
Chris: it's because it's so simple and because I'm using the Home Assistant automation
Chris: and architecture, it works really well.
Chris: So I have the Home Assistant dashboard, which has a switch for the ngrok tunnel,
Chris: which then sends the rest command to start or stop the ngrok tunnel.
Chris: Then using the API, it pulls back the status of the tunnel. It updates the...
Chris: My dns record with that new url from the.
Wes: Status home assistant doing that or your python automation my.
Chris: Python is when the api when after the python script starts the tunnel it retrieves
Chris: the url and updates the dns just right back to each other.
Wes: Gotcha yep.
Chris: Uh but then it delivers that back via the api to home assistant as well.
Wes: And then how does do you have to like set certain stuff in home assistant in
Wes: terms of like fields to pick out of the response is there a standard protocol
Wes: in terms of like you know reading like use this field to tell if it's up or down kind of yeah Yeah.
Chris: Because it's just giving back really simple JSON, like, yes,
Chris: up, down, you know, status is active, inactive. That's basically it. That's all it is.
Chris: It's so nice. But by that, I essentially get status monitoring.
Chris: By looking at the button, I can tell if the tunnel's up or down.
Chris: But then if I want, I can go into the button and I get an additional history
Chris: of all the time the tunnel was used. Right.
Chris: And then what I did is I essentially start that Python API server with a systemd unit.
Chris: So when the system boots, it's just running via systemd, that little Python listener.
Wes: And then that guy also is what interfaces with ngrok's API, right?
Wes: Which is sort of like, hey, toggle this tunnel on.
Wes: And then as long as you have separately that little tunneling daemon running
Wes: and available, it'll pick up on that automatically.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Cool.
Chris: And then it's using the Cloudflare API, which I had to go create an API key,
Chris: obviously, for the different zones it needed to manage and whatnot.
Chris: And it's using that to do all the DNS and redirect on my subdomain that always remains the same.
Chris: So I always just go to the same URL and I never have to, I always have a vanity
Chris: URL for it. I never have to worry about any of it.
Chris: And then when we're done, I just pull up the Home Assistant app on my phone,
Chris: tap the button on the media card, on the media dashboard.
Chris: And it takes about 10, 15 seconds and then the tunnel closes.
Chris: That's it. And I had you boys try it this morning and I just told you what URL
Chris: to go to and you do get an NGROC screen. But I'm curious to see what your impressions were.
Chris: I'll start with you, Brantley, since you were probably on the most remote sketch
Chris: connection out of the two. Well, it's just what it is.
Brent: Yeah, I have to say it just felt like the native experience.
Brent: Aside from that NGROC screen that you...
Brent: To say, yeah, yeah, I, you know, I trust the person who sent me this weird,
Brent: crazy link, which I'm not sure I should have answered that.
Brent: But then I just got the, you know, usual Jellyfin interface and stole your credentials
Brent: and it seemed to work perfectly fine.
Brent: There was a little bit of buffering on my end, but I think we figured out that
Brent: that's because it was your box was doing a little bit of transcoding to send it my way.
Brent: Not because necessarily of bad connections, but just because of hardware.
Brent: Is that, was that your assessment as well?
Chris: Yeah, just that Spaceballs was 4K, UHD.
Brent: That was the only thing to test with. Yeah, I couldn't find anything else.
Chris: No, of course not. No, I don't know. So, Wes, I know it's not the most performance
Chris: solution, but if you took out that Ngrok prompt screen, which I think would
Chris: go away if I paid for it, it feels like a pretty seamless solution.
Chris: You wouldn't even know. You just go into any web browser and Jellyfin just comes right up.
Wes: Yeah one thing i wasn't sure that i didn't check when i was looking at it was
Wes: um are you doing like a cloud for flare proxy to apply a correct cert name like
Wes: on that level or does ncroc get that right yeah or maybe jellyfin just doesn't
Wes: care no jellyfin cares but do you tell them because then you're adding your
Wes: own like wrapping layer right i.
Chris: Wonder if maybe it is it is probably also solved it via it must have been solved
Chris: at the cloud level it's just,
Chris: I don't recall going through that process.
Wes: But in any case, at least doing it in the browser, I didn't do a complicated app or Chromecast test.
Chris: You don't have to do a fake search. But it worked just fine.
Wes: Yeah. And it is interesting. You mentioned possible limitations with bandwidth.
Wes: Again, you're using a free plan from a thing, so there's risks with that.
Wes: And I think, as far as I knew, I've never used them extensively,
Wes: but I think Ncroc started from making it easy to expose staging developer stuff.
Wes: I'm working on something developing over here, and I want to do a demo and share that.
Chris: So yeah, so here's my API on my private box is really, yeah, and I, you're right.
Chris: And I do think if you were going for raw performance, Cloudflare is probably
Chris: better because their network's a little more robust.
Chris: And additionally, they don't have that one gigabyte limit on the free plan.
Chris: So there's that. However, I really like Ngrok, so I'm not necessarily inclined to change it.
Wes: Well, and as you saw, right, like it was, the UX was good.
Wes: It was well supported out there. There's a lot of examples. There's API integrations
Wes: for it and all that. So there's a lot of benefits too.
Chris: The cool thing is because I kept the configuration and Home Assistant itself
Chris: to something really basic, it's four or five lines of YAML, I can change out.
Chris: Ngrok and cloudflare and keep the home assistant part working because i just
Chris: keep the api endpoints the same if it's if it's ngrok or cloudflare and then
Chris: i don't have to readjust anything in home assistant and it keeps working i tested
Chris: this i swapped out to cloudflare tunnels temporarily,
Chris: and uh you know just kept the api url
Chris: endpoints the same even though now it's not ngrok and it
Chris: works so that flexibility i really love in a sense
Chris: it's modular right the jellyfin the media server it could be plex it could
Chris: be sync thing it could be my my my documentation
Chris: it could be my lube logger it could be any app
Chris: and it can be any it could be ngrok it could
Chris: be funnels it could be channel tunnels it could be any tunneling technology
Chris: you want and then with home assistant it that just stays agnostic as well but
Chris: they all really seamlessly work together and i don't ever manually start this
Chris: tunnel even though i know the command to start the tunnel i don't ever i just
Chris: Oh, I just bring it up on Home Assistant and start it.
Chris: Like this morning when you guys wanted to try it, I just asked the station to that box.
Chris: I'd open up my tab and went over to Home Assistant and I started to tell that one.
Wes: Hit the button. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, hit the button. Yeah. Well, like you said.
Wes: Right, you get the dashboard, you get the metrics, you get the state keeping,
Wes: all that kind of stuff for free.
Chris: It's nice to solve this problem, but it's not the only way. And Wes,
Chris: you played around with something called Jelly Swarm.
Wes: Yeah. You know, you kind of touched on it earlier. Like you transition to Jellyfin
Wes: and it does a lot that we love. But there's some kind of areas that it doesn't
Wes: really compete with Plex in the same way or kind of offer the same functionality.
Wes: And so I just took this as an opportunity to go look around and see what tooling
Wes: folks were building and working on that might sort of fit.
Wes: And so we'd been kind of curious around like proxies or ways to share servers before.
Wes: So jelly swarm advertises itself as
Wes: a reverse proxy that lets you combine multiple jellyfin
Wes: servers into one place if you've got libraries spread across different locations
Wes: or just want everything together jelly swarm makes it easy to access all your
Wes: media from a single interface multiple servers yeah i haven't done that remote
Wes: yeah i've only just got it uh set up but yeah so you can proxy one server or proxy multiple servers.
Brent: Oh i could see us using this for a different uh let's say, purposes.
Chris: Yeah. Unified library access. Browse media from multiple Jellyfin servers in
Chris: one place. Play content straight from the original server.
Wes: Yeah, do you want to try it?
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, I want to try it. You got it up? You got it up right now? Is it working?
Brent: I bet you it's running off his laptop right now.
Wes: Yeah, it is. So don't go crazy.
Chris: I see it.
Wes: Don't go crazy.
Chris: Great. All right. All right. All right. I'm going to just use the traditional
Chris: login. Go ahead and remember. Oh, no. Is that not the traditional login? Oh, is it Chris F?
Brent: No space in the password, too.
Chris: No, of course not. We don't do spaces. We're not here for stinking spaces.
Chris: There we go. I'm in. Boy, it's fast, Wes. That's on your laptop?
Brent: Yeah.
Wes: And then you should, if you, I don't know if you, if you can mute the tab or
Wes: something. I don't know if you want to try it to see if the video will load.
Chris: It's spinning and loaded, boom, right into Deep Space Nine.
Wes: Yeah, all right.
Chris: Season 2, episode 13.
Wes: Armageddon game.
Brent: Wes Sneaky had me test this last night without your knowledge,
Brent: Chris, because he knew he was working on a competing solution,
Brent: and I think he wanted to win.
Brent: I got to say, between the two, Wes is a little smoother.
Brent: There's no, like, yes, I need to trust this crazy human URL,
Brent: and also it loaded pretty quick.
Brent: But the coolest feature I saw was user mapping. Wes, you want to write us through that?
Chris: Oh.
Wes: Yeah, actually, Chris, if you pull that URL back up, if you add slash UI to it,
Wes: I think it'll take you to the management interface.
Chris: Oh, yes, it does. The Jelly Swarm admin interface.
Wes: And then same password, but use Wes as the username there.
Chris: I do love our security practices. Okay. Is it Wes P or is it just Wes?
Wes: No, just W-E-S. It should be. Oh, no, it's admin. Sorry, it's admin.
Chris: Now we know what Wes's password is. All right, now we are in.
Chris: I see. So I have one server listed. Yeah.
Wes: Yeah, so this is Jelly Swarm. It's a Rust-based app.
Wes: It's got like just a little minimal web server that it hosts as well as being
Wes: a proxy that shows its own full Jellyfin UI and so it's pretty simple right
Wes: now, really early days for the project I think.
Wes: But yeah, you've got servers you can configure users and then some basic settings.
Wes: So the first thing you do of course is well what are you proxying?
Wes: And so this is where it's being proxied over a mesh network back to my laptop.
Wes: But you can see here where you could add multiple ones. They have a priority
Wes: field which I haven't played with.
Chris: How are you getting this public to the internet?
Wes: For this demo, the proxy is running on a VPS.
Chris: A VPS. I see.
Wes: And then talking over the mesh network back to my server at home.
Chris: That is a very nice solution. So you have a VPS that's got a mesh network interface,
Chris: and then it can proxy these. And it works really well.
Chris: And it's like three fields to add a new Jellyfin server to this,
Chris: as long as it can access it.
Wes: And then if you go to the users tab, you'll see one thing that's interesting is,
Wes: it does a layer of mapping. So it has its own directory of users,
Wes: and then you choose how to map those onto the credentials to the actual Jellyfin
Wes: servers that it's being proxied to.
Wes: So I was able to map both of your guys' fake proxy accounts onto the one Wes
Wes: account that I have on my actual Jellyfin server.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: And you could do it other ways too, right? But that gives you a lot of flexibility, I think.
Chris: Wow, that's great. This is really, really cool. Huh.
Wes: Now, one downside I saw in this early version, I don't know if they're going
Wes: to try to fix that or what.
Wes: One part, I did have to still set up like a full forward to my Jellyfin instance,
Wes: because everything worked in terms of being fully proxied through JellySwarm,
Wes: except when I would try to play the media.
Wes: And it looked like for that, it was still ultimately getting served a link to
Wes: the backing Jellyfin server.
Wes: So if you knew the right, if you were watching the network traffic,
Wes: you could go figure out like where the backing server is that's being proxied
Wes: from that same VPS, but you don't have an account for it because you have credentials
Wes: that are only valid for the proxy.
Wes: And I think eventually, right, it could be that this is able to proxy the media too.
Wes: I don't know what the full plans are there. So there are some caveats, but...
Wes: I was impressed, honestly, with how well it worked. I was able to test it with
Wes: doing a Chromecast here at the house. That was totally fine.
Wes: And it works just fine with the Android Jellyfin app, too.
Chris: Well, I see it's still actively updated. It's kind of a new project,
Chris: but it's under active development. Last four days ago, things were created in
Chris: last week, a bunch of stuff.
Chris: And it's GPL 2.0. It is Jelly Swarm. Bring all your Jellyfin servers together.
Chris: I think this is the route I'm actually going to go for Jellyfin.
Chris: Because then we could also, over time, we could add each other's servers,
Chris: which sounds like a lot of fun.
Chris: And then this tunnel thing I've come up with seems useful for other types of
Chris: self-hosted services that I want to temporarily make available.
Chris: I like Jelly Swarm a lot. So it's LukeS22 on GitHub and we'll put a link to this in the show notes.
Wes: I did also see just a quick smattering of other things that we should,
Wes: that maybe were worth checking out.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Wes: Sadly, it has not been updated yet for the latest, like Jellyfin just had that
Wes: big new release with the database upgrade and all that.
Wes: So 10.11, that doesn't support it, But there is a flake out there called declarative jellyfin.
Chris: Oh, this is up your alley.
Wes: Yes, right? So basically you can define all your jellyfin stuff in your NixOS setup.
Wes: So once that's updated for the new 10.11 version, I think that's going to be
Wes: killer, especially if you wanted to quickly automate standing these kind of
Wes: things up, or you just wanted to have a more maintainable jellyfin.
Chris: You found some good ones. You got a couple of other good ones in here, Wes.
Wes: So check out JellyHub. It's a web app that allows you to fetch media from all
Wes: of your jellyfin servers and regroup it into one place.
Wes: So there's one place to search for a specific media and tells you on which server
Wes: the desired media is located.
Wes: So you could kind of see some combo of like Jelly Swarm and Jelly Hub.
Wes: Maybe that starts to get you a little more to like the Plexus.
Chris: Oh my gosh, this is so great for me because I have a couple of disparate,
Chris: smaller Jellyfin servers and then ideally- Subfins.
Wes: Of course.
Chris: Right, subfins. And then you'd have like a central fin at the server,
Chris: like the main fin, the main that. And it's also GPL3, JellyHub.
Wes: I also found Jellyman and Jellyroller, which are both like a set of scripts
Wes: and or CLI utilities meant to like help manage your Jellyfin.
Wes: So if you do start automating and rolling things out, you can check those out.
Wes: And the docs were entirely in Chinese. So I did my best to translate it.
Wes: But MB to local player, which is something I've wanted before,
Wes: because one of the great things about Jellyfin, right, is it makes it super
Wes: easy to just download or to get direct stream access to the media without having
Wes: to fuss with its UI or anything.
Wes: Well mb to local player basically automates doing that but with hooks to like
Wes: go back and try to sync your watched status which is what you lose if you take
Wes: things out of the whole system.
Chris: Oh that's brilliant.
Wes: So imagine just like using mpv to watch your video locally while you're working
Wes: at your desk and then still have that data in the system.
Chris: Wow nice finds very nice we'll have links to all of that in the show notes of
Chris: course also would love to hear your
Chris: crazy network tunneling solutions and security solutions for my setup.
Chris: Like, you know, maybe if I keep using this, I should build in some security.
Chris: So boost in and let us know. It's a great way to support the show and share
Chris: the knowledge and links to all of this in the notes.
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Brent: Well, we've got a nice round of boosts here and it all starts with the dude
Brent: who's abiding. 87,654 sats.
Brent: Thank you very much. It says, greetings to all, long time no boost.
Brent: I'm left behind, currently in the middle of episode 639 and slowly crawling
Brent: my way to the most recent one.
Brent: Chris, not sure you decided on a home assistant machine, but I have the blue
Brent: and it's been rock solid for four years?
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Wow.
Brent: It's an Odroid N2+, which on paper it sits at 2.2 watts idle and 6 watts at
Brent: full load. I have it connected via PoE and I can see it sips 2.32 watts right now.
Brent: As for Zigbee, I have an Ethernet adapter.
Brent: Not sure you can go that route, though.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. And also, he says, do you still use Plex?
Chris: Yes, because of the remote streaming. Well, so far. But check out WatchState, which will sync them.
Chris: A tool primarily to sync your backends. User PlayState, which is really the
Chris: thing that's really the big deal.
Wes: Yeah, and traps a lot of people where they are.
Chris: Plex, Jellyfin, and Embe. Embe.
Brent: Embe.
Chris: How about that? Yep. And they hit their version 1.0 stable release on October 29th.
Chris: There's another great tip. That's a good one. I didn't know about that.
Chris: There's no reason not to have your watch state synced.
Wes: Yeah, you've been manually syncing it yourself, watching the episode twice, the whole thing.
Chris: Fucking animal. Yeah, I just watched them again. I don't know.
Chris: By the way, just a quick aside. The Home Assistant Blue is what runs the studio's
Chris: Home Assistant automation.
Chris: And it has been very solid. It's not crazy powerful, but the needs here are not as much.
Chris: So, yes. So I will say, I don't know if they sell it anymore,
Chris: but I will say it has been a very solid machine.
Chris: I've been very grateful for the Blue. And I bought it as soon as they announced
Chris: it. Don't tell you that much.
Chris: Marcel's here with a row of McDucks. How about that?
Chris: 22,222 sats.
Chris: That was way too cheap of a baller boost, so I have some more sats.
Chris: Thanks for taking a look at my setup last week after the show and the post-show.
Chris: You had a refreshingly balanced take. Still not sure what I'll do.
Chris: I'm really reluctant to run it in a VM. So far, I've needed that software again. Oh, yeah.
Wes: Right. At the end of the last episode, we took a look at STM32CubeProgrammer,
Wes: which was proving quite difficult to run on Nix.
Chris: Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. Let us know. Keep us posted. VM could be a way.
Chris: Maybe a container. I don't know.
Wes: Our pal and buddy Jeff comes in with 14,000 sats.
Wes: Simple request this time i want to hear that live pew sound yeah that hits thank.
Chris: You pj appreciate that.
Brent: Well distro stew came in with 11 101 sats,
Brent: is that a row of sticks thanks for roasting my
Brent: configs i use git a little differently though sync
Brent: thing is my source of truth my desktop is kind
Brent: of the command center so i mostly edit the configs from my
Brent: other headless servers there then in a server
Brent: terminal i just have it run the rebuild switch since the configs instantly sync
Brent: every month or so i'll actually commit to git but this is mostly just for sharing
Brent: i generally think git is too much overhead i don't want to think about commits
Brent: merges or reverts just to update a package on the system oh.
Chris: Fighting words wes fighting words.
Brent: Actually.
Wes: I was going to say, I love this. Thank you for sharing, DistroStu.
Wes: I love that we have the kind of audience that takes the tools and uses them
Wes: however they want, right? Yeah, sure. Totally great for this.
Chris: But when I do it that way.
Wes: You can combine the two in a variety of useful ways.
Chris: It's fine for them, just not for me.
Wes: Well, hey, I've got to be the Chris config bar raiser. DistroStu's got lots
Wes: going on already. She's got a great config.
Chris: All right, all right. Okay, all right. A dude trying, thank you Distro Stu.
Chris: A dude trying stuff comes in with a row of ducks. That's 2,222 sats.
Chris: Well, I love the idea of the home lab holidays. I'm currently trying to get
Chris: everything into IAC and pivoting my home lab to Bootsy.
Wes: Oh, interesting. That's awesome.
Chris: Side note, how many sats to add that bit of Chris saying IDK how the world works
Chris: to the soundboard? I find that too relatable.
Chris: Well, somebody's got to track it down. Did I say that? Because that does feel...
Wes: Yeah, if you've got a flak file for us, I mean...
Chris: Send us a flack.
Wes: I can bribe the soundboard guy.
Chris: Yeah, Wes does have connections. Thank you, dude, trying stuff. Appreciate that boast.
Wes: Retro Gear comes in with 8,555 sets.
Wes: Gents, check out GitHub, SalmonNet, it's called, it's a project under that org,
Wes: Proxmox-NixOS, because it actually works pretty well.
Wes: I'm running a few VMs on there that can't be done with modules or Docker containers. Cheers.
Wes: Oh, and on SoundBytes, have any of you seen Spies Like Us with Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd from 1985?
Wes: Full of absolute crackers.
Chris: Check it out. I do know of the movie. I have not seen it. I have not seen it.
Chris: But I think there's going to be...
Wes: Well, maybe you could just go put it on your shared jellyfin for us.
Chris: Right? And sit down with the clip machine and just watch the movie,
Chris: it sounds like. That's pretty great. Thank you, Retro Gear. Good to hear from you.
Wes: Yeah. I mean, I have not yet dared to try Proxmox Next OS.
Wes: But if I was going to go Proxmox, obviously, that's how I'd want to do it.
Wes: And so having an experience report is super useful.
Chris: Okay. All right. This is Proxmox Next OS. us.
Brent: We have a boost here from Dirt Ferguson, 13,333 sets.
Brent: For the home lab holidays, consider a category of systems that do the most with the least.
Chris: Oh, yeah. I definitely think you don't have to have a crack and crazy home lab to enter the contest.
Chris: You know, it could be a laptop or a pie. It could, you know,
Chris: it's just, it's sort of a little bit about what you're getting done with it
Chris: too. Now, of course, We'd love to see the crazy cool setups.
Chris: I mean, you know, sometimes your home lab's a tiny computer in a drawer. Still send it in.
Brent: Crazy cool doesn't preclude the eccentric. I'm open to that.
Wes: No, I think it, in fact, should encourage the eccentric. That's how I'll be scoring, personally.
Chris: Thank you, Turd. Appreciate that. Chloroflore is here with 8,000. One, two, three sats.
Chris: How about that? I don't know, Brent. I think there might be a message in there.
Chris: Best secret port boost.
Brent: Oh.
Chris: Ooh, I think he's giving me a message there. You know what I mean?
Wes: Hey, I know that board.
Chris: Because that's the 8123, the Home Assistant?
Wes: The Home Assistant board.
Chris: I think it's the Home Assistant board, isn't it? Let me double check.
Chris: I got it right here. 8123, yeah.
Chris: I got it in a tab. All right, thank you everybody who boosted in,
Chris: including those of you who streamed them sats as you listened.
Chris: In fact, 28 of you collectively helped to stack 53,513 of them Satoshis.
Chris: When you bring it all together, we got 221,137 sats. That's a pretty cool number.
Chris: 221-137. We really appreciate it. There's a lot of ways to support the show
Chris: because it's a value for value podcast.
Chris: Your time, your talent, and your treasure are all very much appreciated.
Chris: Show's been going on for a long time now, y'all. And one of the reasons is because
Chris: our audience has made it possible between the interactions we get in the community,
Chris: the support we get via the boost and the membership, but also your listenership.
Chris: It means a lot to us. We really appreciate it.
Chris: Fountain FM makes it really easy to boost these days. There's also ways you
Chris: can go on the self-hosted Sovereign route with AlbiHub.
Chris: Go pick out a new podcast app at podcastapps.com. Not only do you get a lot
Chris: of new features like the live stream, instant updates, and all that, but you can also boost.
Chris: It's podcastapps.com. Thank you, everybody, who boosted episode 642 of your Unplugged program.
Chris: Let's keep it on topic this week. We've been talking a lot about media servers,
Chris: so let's just wrap it up with a pick.
Chris: It's right on point. It's called Subgen, and it auto-generates subtitles,
Chris: Subgen, for your media, be it Jellyfin, Plex, XMBC.
Chris: I don't know what you're using these days with your Xboxes and your media centers, but it'll do it.
Chris: It'll generate subtitles and create a .srt subtitle for any media file that
Chris: you add, and it can be then read by your, assuming you've got something that
Chris: understands SRT files. It's pretty nice.
Chris: You found this, Wes, and of course it's a Python app. It's been a minute.
Brent: I'm assuming the way to use this is to process all your media files ahead of
Brent: time or trigger it if you're getting some new stuff.
Brent: But I'm assuming with some of the Whisper models being so efficient,
Brent: you can also use this in real time if you have the right pipeline.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Ooh, special. I like it.
Chris: I think you could. I think you could. Again, can we all just get on board with buffering?
Chris: Like start your movie and i'm not now for your land you shouldn't have to but
Chris: when it comes to content or anything that's getting auto-generated or internet
Chris: streaming can we just buffer a little bit let me buffer so many media apps kill this why.
Wes: Am i paying for this ram if you're not going to fill it with pre-cached.
Chris: Video a lot of the media services used to buffer more and now they buffer less you.
Wes: Know i think we bring back that um flash youtube player because it would buffer.
Chris: Bring back buffering i.
Brent: Feel like if you just played an ad before you got your jellyfin media playing
Brent: then you could do the buffering during the ad time have you considered this.
Chris: That would be really really cool we need a jellyfin.
Wes: Plugin that adds our own dynamic ads into.
Chris: It yeah,
Chris: so there is speaking of jellyfin though west there is some jellyfin like integration
Chris: you can kind of do with the jellyfin webhooks plug-in.
Wes: Yeah i'm impressed with this thing just because it is like you can use it
Wes: in bizarre or plex or mb but with jellyfin you pretty
Wes: much just use the webhooks plug-in which is standard i think
Wes: that's just to like be able to communicate like when
Wes: you add new media jellyfin find stuff it can go ping subgen and
Wes: then as long as subgen has like the same mounts for the file so
Wes: it has the same paths that jellyfin shares then it
Wes: can go off and generate the SRTs and like
Wes: you know obviously this software like there's robust support for
Wes: subtitles especially if you're getting them from sources or standard media
Wes: items that have those out on the internet or if you're doing pinch flat
Wes: and your youtube sucking in software like does that for you but if you're like
Wes: me and you frequently go crazy and stand up wild jellyfin servers you might
Wes: not have signed in to open subtitles you might not have copied everything you
Wes: know like you might having a subtitle method of last resort or for random mp4
Wes: files you want to stick there. It just seems great.
Chris: Very often. And, you know, like one of my kids, they just prefer to watch the
Chris: movies with the subtitles and not all of it has it. So it's really nice to have this as an option.
Chris: It's MIT licensed, 98.8% all snake.
Chris: And you can find a link to subgen in the show notes.
Chris: Now, Wes, if we said something that somebody wanted to go back and find,
Chris: or if they wanted to replay a segment, we probably have resources they could
Chris: take advantage of, right?
Wes: Yeah, they just run subgen on our file. No, actually, we do that already.
Wes: So you go check out the RSS feed with a podcasting 2.0 capable client,
Wes: which is the easiest way to do it.
Wes: And we got chapters baked right into the MP3, but also in a JSON file we keep
Wes: in the cloud. So you get the latest and greatest chapters.
Wes: But you can also get an SRT or VTT file of your very own and follow along with a transcript.
Chris: And it's probably worth mentioning, guys. This is going to be our last few episodes of the year.
Chris: We're coming in we have a few things planned still it's
Chris: not like we're wrapping up yet but as far as it gets to like
Chris: episode planning for us we are in we are now planning
Chris: our last few episodes which means we only have a
Chris: few more live streams of this year and as we get into mid-December some of them
Chris: are going to be double live stream recording episodes we will have the holiday
Chris: home labs coming up it'll happen faster than you think so if you get a little
Chris: time when you're around on a
Chris: Sunday join us over at jblive.tv we do the show at 10 a.m. Pacific 1 p.m.
Chris: Eastern but you can have the robot convert it to your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Chris: It is a special live vibe thing. It's unique in the world of podcasts.
Chris: It's not something we brag about or talk about a lot, but do you know any other
Chris: podcast in the world that has an open mumble room that anybody with a working
Chris: mic and headphones can join and share their opinion?
Chris: Now, people don't abuse it, obviously, but it's available. If they tag me in
Chris: the chat room and they have something they want to say, they can talk.
Chris: And that is open to all types of people. Now, of course, you abuse it.
Chris: You probably get kicked out. But it's a really unique aspect to the show.
Chris: And then you combine that with the live people that are watching and giving
Chris: us feedback and helping title it in real time.
Chris: And then the members that finance it and the boosters who give value to each individual episode.
Chris: It is a very unique thing we are doing. And then to have been going for so many years.
Chris: I mean, we're breathing down on 700 episodes of doing our absolute best every
Chris: single Sunday to give you the best Linux coverage.
Chris: And our only bias and motivation is to give the best coverage to our number one customer.
Chris: And the number one customer is always and has been our audience.
Chris: And I just think when you combine the mumble room, the way the show is supported,
Chris: the ingredients, how long we've been going, our focus and our goals as presenters
Chris: that we are all three aligned on. It's something very unique.
Chris: And only a few more episodes of this year will be live.
Chris: And it gets extra special and fun when you can participate live.
Chris: JBLive.tv or if you just want to plug it in on a web browser,
Chris: JBLive.fm. We're also on the commercial video platforms for the live stream.
Chris: And, of course, members get the entire bootleg. They get a sense of it,
Chris: but it's a whole other thing when you hear live.
Chris: I wanted to make that plug just as we roll into the holiday season and as we
Chris: bang out all these episodes and we have all this stuff. Like we're going to
Chris: get moving quick and I might not get a chance to remind you again.
Chris: And it is something very unique and it will not last forever.
Chris: And it is here right now. And it's something very special in media, in my opinion.
Chris: Of course, I'm a little biased on the topic. So go check out the show notes
Chris: for more info for what we talked about today. A lot of good resources.
Chris: Consider a membership. I will probably have a Black Friday sale soon,
Chris: but I don't have one right now.
Chris: But we'd still appreciate if you had a membership or wanted to boost the show.
Chris: Again with how to secure my crazy tunnel
Chris: solution and if you have any questions about it too also send those in as well
Chris: and check out linuxunplugged.com just so that way we have a reason to have a
Chris: website after all it's not all about the podcast app although we try to make
Chris: it as good as possible also links to our matrix our mumble other community resources
Chris: over at linuxunplugged.com and that submission form,
Chris: that's linuxunplugged.com slash holiday for the automatic form.
Chris: And linuxunplugged.com slash oldfart for the Markdown version you can send in via email.
Chris: Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program.
Chris: And we'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday.