I'm a techie by trade who matured using proprietary technologies like Windows, but reached my breaking point once ads were introduced at the OS level. Since then I've been on something of a personal vendetta against big tech. It's been about 4 years now, and I thought I'd share my experience.
My first and predominant interest was securing a means of private communication that wasn't centralised. Like many before me, I stumbled upon Matrix. Adoption was problematic; I couldn't help people understand why using WhatsApp, Discord, etc. was a bad idea. But ultimately I managed to convince most of the people in my circle to migrate to my Matrix server by adding IdP (using Keycloak). The login is also tied to various other services, but the carrot that drew most of them in was my Jellyfin instance.
It's running on a home server with ~60TB of hard drive space, and each user also has access to Seerr for requesting content, so it's become quite an extensive library over time. Building the server cost somewhere in the region of 5k to set up (it hosts far more than just Jellyfin), plus a small monthly fee for the VPS I use as a reverse proxy. I offer everything free of charge as a labour of love for the people I care about.
I also provide free tech support to any of my users running any instance of Linux, both hardware and software. Windows users are advised to search their issues online, or allow me to install a dualboot Linux option to help them reach a resolution. I even go as far as offering a free 256GB NVMe for this purpose, provided they've a free M2 slot in their builds.
In my experience, bringing the layperson into the open source world is definitely possible, but it comes at great personal expense. People don't like change, but evidently they hate adverts even more so.
I'm keen to hear about others with similar experiences this far down the rabbit hole. what have you found that works in helping with wider adoption of open source technologies in your communities?
how much media do u have on your jellyfin server?
i installed Linux on my kids laptops. that's all they use right now. wife is on a Mac..
The total space used is somewhere in the region of 20tb. I recently expanded to it by another 30tb by adding a seagate ironwolf pro hard drive to the build.
It's overkill in all honesty, and I don't have a raid setup/backups on any of my jellyfin drives, I figure none of it is irreplacable, and opted for maximum space possible over redundancy. But one day drives will inevitably fail, and a lot of content will be lost. I also have a pretty hands off style with the content added, so there's no doubt plenty of space I could reclaim if I were to more actively manage the content.
My servers configuration files as well as irreplacable content like immich data etc. are all running on much more modestly sized (but just as expensive) 4TB NVMes, which are in a basic RAID 1 setup. The server itself is running on a 256gb NVMe, with no consideration for redundancy. If the OS dies, I'll just reformat, and spin up services using the compose files stored in the RAID setup.
Glad to hear you're starting them on the foss path young ๐ Mac users are a tough nut to crack in my experience! They're usually very invested in the apple ecosystem, and it makes finding an alternative for their everyday usage a busy task to say the least!
wait, what kind of redundancy setup do you have? how did you add 20 TB with just a single HDD?
Using ironwolf pros for the HDD space, they're enterprise grade high storage SATA HDDs that go as high as 32TB these days I believe.
If you use this approach, its important to make note of the workload rate of the drive you're looking at. Anything marked as a NAS drive should be designed for 24/7 operation, whereas standard HDDs will likely crap out far sooner, but connectivity wise, the only important step is to ensure the drive is SATA rather than SAS connection, otherwise you'll end up fiddling with PCI-e adapters which is wasteful IMO.
I've not built any redundancy into the media drives. Opting for maximum space possible instead. I don't consider any of the content to be irreplaceable. Config for the Arr stack (Sonarr, Radar etc..) is held on my RAID NVMes that also has non local backups, so theoretically, when a media drive is lost, any content can be redownloaded onto a replacement drive with little effort.
Hey Iโve been thinking of a similar setup.
For media, and with storage prices being what they are, I was going to forego redundancy for a while.
Do you have a list of media and torrents / usenet indexes that you back up?
Iโm wondering how I can easily or even auto Aye redownloading media if a disk blows up.