selfhosting jellyfin, ram prices & more

i recently finished watching lord of the rings trilogy. it's been on my watchlist for a long time. i have watched and read about tolkien's works, his life and his world. there was a tolkien biography movie that came out long ago. i watched it and that's what got me into. i also know of tolkien because i know he's childhood friend of c.s. lewis. i don't know how i know that. i don't remember reading any works of c.s lewis either, but somehow i know that.

i wish more people i know get on letterboxd. i have been using it for more than a while now. it's a great platform to keep track of movies you have watched or just add it to watchlist for later. in case, you haven't followed my letterboxd, you can find me here: letterboxd.com/dharmiik.

my home topology is something right now. it used to be far more complex until i looked into my ISP's default firmware and realized that it ain't that bad. it's amazing, it ain't that bad will be me phrasing it like it's stupid.

there are a lot of cool features it provides. i can configure static routes (it's basic or maybe ofcourse my lack of experience with propetiary firmware. it frigging let's me configure QoS policies. Who frigging thought that for a consumer router).

the topology used to be weird prior. i had two networks. the default isp one and then my openwrt one. i finally when setting up my homelab and setting up a lot of services (more on that later in the blog), thought finally, today might be the day and added a static route. primarily because, adguard runs on my tower running ubuntu server, and that is on the openwrt network, so the few devices that were on the isp one couldn't use it.

i still want to find a good time and try the QoS policy on OvH firmware.

sometime in the month i read jeff geerling's DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market and it's so true. i really might have heard a dozen of friends of how they are waiting for the pricing to go down. everyone is wanting to upgrade.

i have been cleaning the machine that runs casa os and ubuntu server for me at home. oh boy, i haven't opened the cabinet of that device in years. well, not years. never ever since it's inception and holy moly that thing was dusty. photos for reference.

i have got new thermal paste to apply on the processor. it was all dried up. got a extra hdd for backups. my immich backups are increasing.

one of the incident that hit me was two days ago, when last weekend started, i put everything apart. removed the fan processor, ram, wiped everything (physically, wipe off the dust). and put things inside. pushing back the cpu on the motherboard required a little pressure. i was a little afraid that i was going to press a little harder. the dust was too much and i was not able to figure out where was the traingle i was supposed to align with on the motherboard.

then when i got things together and booted it up, the problem is i didn't have monitor. so i had to ssh into my router and see the dhcp.leases file. now it did boot, fan started, but no lights getting started on the motherboard when i plug in the lan cable. now i am under the impression, "voila, we have fried the motherboard or maybe broke it or something". then i gave up thinking the game's over and i will have to order a new computer.

next day i woke up with new born motivation. picked up my screw driver and opened everything again. well, looking at the ram i saw, i haven't closed the hinge properly. well, closed it. plugged the power and lan cable again and magic, it started again. ssh'ed to my router and there it was. working fine like a good wine.

now we are hitting the basics. can a computer boot without ram? well, the answer is evident, it can't. it's basic. how can one think otherwise? well, i was supposed to know this.

a os upon starting stores instructions, initialize firmware (BIOS/UEFI) and things.

i love immich. i have been using it for around more than a year. the setup has changed a lot. priorly, i was used to sync it in my network. now i do it every once in a while from odd places when i have not get anything else to do using tailscale.

talking about my homelab. i also have a media server stack i have been tinkering with. it's a combination of qbittorent, radarr, prowlarr and jellyfin.

i use casaos (though i now think using zimaos, fork of casa would be more fun). now i initially thought to do it via casa itself, to setup all the services... but i ditched it (i found it more complex. the way casaos handles docker containers) and did it manually.

i can now search for a movie in radarr and it gets downloaded to my jellyfin library via the prowlarr indexing. though i am still looking for good bollywood torrents (drop me a message if you have something).

i do have a lot of posts i have to post (yes, deliberate use of post as a noun and verb in a single sentence).

it's been a long time i have posted on anything on this blog and i have got a lot of opinions about a lot of things. newer opinions. starting from my new born hatred for the cosmic desktop environment and how system76 has ruined it, new born love for wireguard, oh boy i have loved tailscale. i have been dipping my hands in yocto. i will write about it once i have something good going in it. right now a lot i don't understand there. i got introduced to firewalla (it's a device. check their story) and i am a fan. one would say life's been a lot of fun.

everyonce in a while i have the urge to upgrade my homelab setup. for right now it's mostly powered by a old computer i built (got built, i was idk 16. must be 2020?. i don't recall). i don't have problem with keeping it on all the time, except for ofcourse then i need to figure out power consumption. how much power it consumers. power is still relatively cheap in india. it's not a problem for us, but i need to see how much it adds up.

my setup's that. a tp link router that has openwrt flashed and a vps i use for tunnels, so i get a public ip.

i just setup jellyfin, radarr qbittorent, prowlarr. trust me i honestly don't put my time aside to watch a movie (not like i don't have time. i am in bed all weekend, it's not a conscious decision i make), in retrospect to the dedication i am putting in getting things up. as they say "heart wants what the heart wants", and it sure wants a few containers automating my movie watching work(leisure)flow this time.

i am plannning to cancel all my subscriptions. get a few friends onboard as well.

yup, this is what bugs me. "getting friends onboard". i thought tailscale would be easy. easy as well. it's not. ACL get's more confusing everytime you look at it.

i had to build a solution on top of wireguard for this. my use case is a bit different though. i started because i wanted to give friends access to specific things in my homelab, but very selectively. like “you can use jellyfin on this one machine, but you can’t ssh, and you can’t even see my other devices”

tailscale is honestly amazing for getting devices connected, i still use it a lot. but once i started trying to do these very specific “this machine can talk to that machine only on this port” kind of setups, it started feeling more complex than it should be, at least for personal use. ACL editor is more confusing when it comes to this. i know we have got option for tags and things, but those are very poorly documented and i haven't found a single tutorial that works nicely.

to which a controdictory opinion would be why not use netbird? well, for starters, i want complete control, and hosting netbird, the control plan consumes around 400mb ram. another things is that people who use my homelab (well, i want it to be this way) would be mostly non technical people. i don't want them to make their account on one more service. a simple curl command that'd fetch my script and install it. i am still buiding it. i haven't thought of a name, but i'd put it on my github. (rip my cgit instance).

my go service barely consumes any. it's nothing more than UI built on top of wireguard.

recently ubuntu 26.04 LTS came out and i am reading the mixed opinions it's having. i didn't know ubuntu in the linux community has the reputation of microsoft. apparently people hate on snaps and the "Buy pro ads" that canonical keeps pushing in their community builds is hurting people's sentiments.

well, from a generalist view, ubuntu definitely is something that has made a lot of people use linux. i am under the impression that if it weren't for ubuntu, the year of linux on desktop would be still decades away from now.

i have tried oreo golden. the biscuits along with the cream are vanilla flavoured and there are very less things i have eaten that top this.

found this very intersting middle earth map while i was browsing the web. i am a lotr fan. i am a new fan. i am yet to read the books. i am looking for a good time to read it.