It took me about 50 YouTube videos to get me to a point where I believe I now understand what a reverse proxy is and how I should use one.

I’ve crossed that threshold in Dunning-Kruger where I see how much I don’t know, and it’s simultaneously disheartening and stressful. But hell, what am I going to do now? Quit?

I’m trying to properly learn VLANs and set them up so that I’ve got “self-hosted services exposed to the internet” and “everything else”. So far, the only thing I need to isolate is a NAS with Jellyfin and Komga, but I plan to add more services via a mini PC later. The thing that has made this whole journey frustrating is that every time I try to learn something, even laser targeted, I don’t get the full answer from the first thing I find, and the next answer I find introduces more complexity. I think what I need is a managed switch from my local Micro Center like a Netgear GS108Tv3, to replace the switch currently in my office. Then, if I understand correctly, I think I need to put the NAS (and eventually mini PC) on their own subnet and use VLAN rules to allow traffic to that subnet but not from that subnet to the rest of my LAN. But it’s hard to determine if I’ve even got that right.

I’ve got a UGreen NAS for media hosting, and I’ve been loading it up with Blu Rays and DVDs for the past few weeks to stream via Jellyfin. Going alphabetically, I’ve now made it to the letter J in my library, with 54 movies and 407 episodes of TV ripped so far. I have a tiny comic collection that I started playing with in Komga just yesterday. I intend to scale up slightly, with all of my other self hosting needs handled by a mini PC, which should be enough, that I can retire from its gaming use cases when the Steam Machine comes out. I’m trying to figure out all of the pieces I need in order to safely expose that to the internet for my friends without the use of something like Tailscale. When I started, it was like that Simpsons gag where Homer went from reading Advanced Marketing to Beginner Marketing to looking up the definition in the dictionary. But after about 50 YouTube videos all explaining the same concepts slightly differently between them, it’s starting to click.

Yeah, same. And I’m currently scratching my head on Docker right now. I downloaded a Jellyfin build that was not labeled unstable but is still considered an unstable version, and go figure, everything is behaving correctly now that I’ve actually identified the latest stable version. But I’ve also got three containers, one of them a bespoke version of Jellyfin provided by my NAS manufacturer, and of the other two containers, I can’t figure out yet how to upgrade in place so that it uses the same users and settings from the other container. So that’s where I’m at, haha. After that, I need to figure out how and why SSL certs work and how to set that up, and then I’ve got a lead on exposing that to the internet via WireGuard, a cheap VPS, and a cheap domain name. If I can get all that working, I figure I’ll be ready for hosting something besides Jellyfin on my local network only. And yes, the clock is ticking until Discord becomes a problem.

I believe it was from their GitHub, which is where GamersNexus checked as well. I did subsequently find their blog post. I’m new to self-hosting, and it is taking me longer to learn some crucial pieces of it than I thought, so by the time I’m ready for it, self-hosting for Fluxer may be up again. That said, the only thing I really need Fluxer to do that it looks like Element doesn’t do is screen sharing a game window, and I’m preparing to be able to set up Owncast or something to stream to if that’s the only thing my Discord replacement is bad at, so Fluxer doesn’t have to be my only option.

I don’t. And I don’t know if they put their videos elsewhere.

As a Giant Bomb fan, it’s somewhat renewed interest in forums over there from the operators and users. Discord was always a bad forum anyway, but it was great for immediately being able to have a conversation with people to find answers to problems.

Yes, Fluxer’s self hosting documentation 404s, and Stoat seems to still rely on a central server, which isn’t self hosted enough for my needs. It’s cool that both of them are looking good in the near future, but I want something I can start using in the next few months.

Teamspeak lived long enough to see an exodus from Discord, but that doesn’t mean Discord is dying.

Did you run into the same problems I did with self-hosting? And if not, how did you avoid them?

Would I really be that cooked if I could technically afford to lose all of the data here? It all exists in other places. How likely is it that two drives will fail in the first place? I’ve never had a NAS before, so read/write operations will likely be under more strain, but I’ve had internal hard drives in every computer I’ve ever owned for more than 20 years, and I haven’t had one fail on me until long after the time that computer was the primary machine. The guides I’ve come across in my research all mention standard raid configurations, and I haven’t heard your alternatives come up before; is there a reason for that, like limited compatibility or something? Would it still be easy enough for me to follow a standard setup guide and swap the RAID 5 config for your recommendation if I was so inclined?

Thank you!

Why not?

Thanks! I feel pretty good about the power draw based on what you wrote, even though HDDs are going to add to that, and that’s good to hear about the mini PC running Jellyfin, which gives me some hope for the on-board server in a NAS like the one I’m eyeing. And even if that doesn’t work out, I’ve got my own mini PC that I should be able to leave in place most of the time.

I’m not a total networking noob, but I definitely have some homework to do based on this write-up. Thanks.

You’re a stranger on the internet. Even if I was so petty as to blame you, I’d have a hard time tracking you down, haha.

So then if I’m evaluating a worst case for what I plan to use this NAS for, it would be that an attacker gains access to movies that I have on my shelf, CDs that I have on my shelf, books that I’d have the right to redownload as long as the place I bought them from is still in business, and my own save files for DRM-free video games that Heroic Games Launcher currently tells me not to rely on them for syncing back to GOG.com. At which point, if some attacker found a vulnerability and locked my NAS from me, they’d have caused me an annoyance in that I’d have to reformat those drives and re-rip that media. With no sensitive information intended to be on this thing, it seems pretty low risk, right?

Oh, sorry, haha. There’s a lot of jargon thrown around in a place like this, and I thought this was one I missed.

Sorry, but the SEO on “Q2” is pretty bad. What are you referring to? And what are the actual risks of a port being exposed to the outside world via an off-the-shelf router? Surely they can always hit my IP, and if this port is only exposed for Jellyfin, it would be just as vulnerable as any other port that calls out, right? I ask that knowing that it must be wrong, but I don’t understand how.

If they’re self-hostable, they cease to be live services. And I’m just fine with that. I have no problem completely ignoring live services as a customer, but the problem I do have is how much research it takes to find out if a game I’m interested in is built to last or otherwise respects my values. Every Borderlands game has LAN multiplayer except for the GOTY edition of the first game, and even then, you can still acquire the regular edition of that game that still has it. Meanwhile, Hitman, a single player game, locks a lot of its best stuff behind an arbitrary server connection; the community has made pirate server executables to replace it, but it doesn’t mean that I want to reward IO Interactive with my dollars for that design decision.