Make sure you come back and update me when you try it, and then find out that the cables are all stapled to the studs.

That’s always extra fun to discover once you start running cabling.

Though, if you have good coax everywhere, MOCA is a legitimate option you should be considering, as it’ll do gigabit (more than, even) and the adapters aren’t particularly expensive compared to dealing with having to pull cabling through everywhere.

I’ve never liked web UIs that have that level of permissions to screw around with the OS it’s hosted on.

Maybe that’s just some grumpy greybeard thing, but I’d really rather not have a single management plane that has full access to EVERYTHING, since that just feels like you’re one configuration oopsie away from some guy in Albania (<3 you, Albania) uploading all his hentai to your server and then trying to hack the FBI or some shit. (Or, you know, the much more boring oops-i’m-a-zombie-now outcome.)

Yeah I ran ethernet everywhere when I bought my house and it’s fantastic. Multi-gig everywhere!

I’m also never fucking doing that again because the builder of my house must have gotten a fantastic fucking deal 120 years ago on 2x4s, because they decided to do a narrow cross-bracing between studs on every damn wall, so I had fucking rock-hard old growth 2x4s to drill through every 14 inches or so in every damn wall I was running cables on.

Killed several hundred dollars in drill bits and other tools (broke a few fish tapes!) getting this shit done, AND it took like a month to get finished and then the walls patched where I had to cut into it to see what in the fuck the drill was hitting.

But yeah, ethernet everywhere is great!

I can only be friends with people who use Arch (btw).

Yeah, I’ve never seen a multi-bay enclosure that doesn’t just randomly decide it’s done with this bullshit and have random dropouts or just plain fucking off entirely.

I don’t know WHY they’re so bad, but they are :/

I just converted part of a closet to a network closet and added some shelves and stuffed everything in there, though I know that’s not an option everyone has.

Should ask what platform here, IMO: virt-manager is Linux-only. (Or, I suppose, doing remote X stuff to run it elsewhere but that’s probably not what OP is after.)

There’s some command line stuff you can run on Windows, but then at that point, you can just use virsh on the host itself.

I’m of the opinion that virsh to manage and then a spice or vnc client to access the VMs is the “best” way to go so you’re not tied down to having to have a specific OS running a specific tool in order to do any admin stuff, since I mean, after you deploy how often are you screwing with the VM settings?

IME, they’re all the same chipset/set of chipsets and are all pretty awful.

That said, the most reliable ones I’ve found actually come from drives that have been shucked. Western Digital or whomever aren’t going to do the absolute lowest price piece of shit enclosure for something they’re going to warranty for 3 or 5 years, so those have been what I try to find and have had reasonable luck with them in terms of reliability and not-catching-shit-on-fire.

Usually cheap as shit on eBay or whatever, since they’re basically the packaging trash around something that was purchased for the gooey insides.

Politely, but no.

It’s a compression tool that is also used to mask malware, and you’re proposing to expand it’s use in a use case that’s ALREADY coated in enough malware to give you herpes just by walking past your average tracker.

It’s a bad idea from a security perspective, and it’s not going to outperform a LZMA-based compression tool using a large dictionary (7zip, etc.) which also isn’t fucking with binaries in a way that makes detecting and preventing malicious software more complicated for the average user, who typically knows absolutely zero about what’s going on.

Sorry, I meant antivirus. (Corpo IT calls it endpoint, since it’s, well, the endpoint.)

Pack what executables exactly?

Like take a copy of Nodobe Notoshop and repack it?

If that’s what you mean, uh, politely, but fuck no. Malware is enough of a problem that there’s no way I’d want to start downloading crap that’s been UPXed since that’s going to make it impossible to determine if it’s legitimate or not by (most) endpoint tools, or they’ll just see UPX and go ‘bad shit!’ on everything.

Either is fine: the question is what happens when something breaks and if you care about issues and such.

If your docker host depends on the pihole it’s running, there can be some weirditry if it’s not available during boot and whatnot (or if it crashes, etc.).

…I ended up with a docker container of pihole and an actual pi as the secondary so that it’s nice and redundant.

Yeah, I tried to use music and audiobooks in Jellyfin and even with apps focused on that it was just… rough.

Pity, since I’d love to have been able to scope down how much shit I’m running, but alas, that’s not going to be the way to do it.

Wait you’re saying 30 year old drives are all dying or dead?

I, for one, am COMPLETELY shocked at this totally unexpected and impossible to plan for eventuality.

Who could possibly have known that hard drives might fail after decades?

It looks like it supports the getSimilarSongs API endpoint, which means if your client has support then navidrome can kinda do it.

As to what clients support that, uh, no freaking idea lol, but probably googleable from that point.

(I’m a grumpy old boomer and listen to whole albums or curated playlists, so never really looked into if you could do that or not.)

I know you’ve mentioned it, but Navidrome is probably the best choice, but it won’t be exactly what you want since you need to interact with a proprietary service.

But, that said, I’ve gone through basically every single music server I’ve found and ended up landing on none of them.

They’re all broken or missing features that another one has, and there’s no One True Music Streaming Server, just a bunch of mostly-kinda-sorta-almosts.

At this point, I just use a network mapped directory and/or a synced copy on the sd card of my phone and local players and don’t bother with anything more complex anymore.

The local players that can play media seem to have a much better, richer feature set than ANY streaming one does.

That’s also an option, yeah.

And, if you have the disk space, not an unreasonable one, but for me? DVD quality is pretty bad compared to anything newer and I’ve never noticed any real degredation transcoding a mpeg-2 stream to x265 which is like 25% the filesize, but that’s very ymmv.

Yeah. You can’t offer a half-secure and half-private platform and expect your average person to be able to figure out which half is which, which leads to crazy misconceptions, misunderstandings, and ultimately just a bunch of wrong and misleading information being passed around.

I’d argue, though, that Telegram probably did this on purpose, and profited GREATLY from being obtuse and misleading.

At the moment, essentially.

The way Google got carrier buy-in for yet another messaging platform was to basically run it for them at no charge.

The carriers COULD run their own RCS infra, but if you’re getting the milk for free, why buy the cow?

It’s still a quality-at-a-given-bitrate deficient.

If you’re doing temporary encoding for like, streaming, or something where real-time encoding performance matters it’s still probably the way to go, but if you’re wanting to create high-quality archival stuff it’s still not quite as good as your other options.

Granted, x265 on the cpu is probably still the way to go (excepting maybe if you’re doing AV1 on an ARC gpu), but nvenc and qsv still outclass AMF.

Wish AMD would get a little more serious and bring that up to par, but they seem to be waffling on what they even want to do for consumer gpus so I’m not really holding my breath here.

Assuming you mean commercial DVDs, handbrake+libdvdcss.

It’s pretty much ‘insert disk, hit button, wait some amount of time, video file!’

Would recommend, however, that you do not use AMF (AMD) for encoding, and just stick to QSV/NVENC/x264/x256 because AMD’s quality is uh, less than stellar and you probably want the best possible quality for archiving your DVDs.