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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I’m sorry to say but it’s Windows. You never really know. Have you considered getting an old optiplex on Amazon Renewed and putting Debian and Jellyfin on that?

    Update for the people downvoting:

    I am a professional platform engineer. By ‘Windows. You never really know’ I mean that there are always ten thousand things running, you’re never going to have a full grasp of everything that’s happening in the way that you could with a stripped down linux environment. My own Jellyfin instance is running on

    • Intel® Core™ i5-4590S CPU @ 3.00GHz
    • 8GB RAM
    • Integrated Graphics
    • Shipped AUG 2014
    • Ubuntu 22.04 with deb installation of Jellyfin

    All clients connect via Wifi although server is cat5 to switch. Most of my video does not require transcoding. There are plenty of FLAC audio files in my library. I don’t see slowdowns as described here.






  • Coming from what looks to me like a different perspective to many of the commenters here (Disclosure I am a professional platform engineer):

    If you are already scripting your setups then yes you should absolutely learn/use Ansible. The key reasons are that it is robust, explicit, and repeatable- doesn’t matter whether that’s the same host multiple times or multiple hosts. I have lost count of the number of pet Bash scripts I have encountered in various shops, many of them created by quite talented people. They all had problems. Some typical ones:

    Issue Example
    Most people write bash scripts without dependency checks ‘Of course everyone will have gnu coreutils installed, it’s part of every Linux distro’ - someone runs the script on a Mac
    We need to pass this action out to a command-line tool, that’s obvious Fails if command-line tool isn’t available, no handling errors from tool if they aren’t exactly what’s expected
    Of course people will realise that they need to run this from an environment prepared in this exact (undocumented) way Someone runs the script in a different environment
    Of course people will be running this on x86_64/AMD64, all these third party binaries are available for that Someone runs it on ARM
    Of course people will know what to do if the script fails midway through People try to re-run the script when it fails mid-way through and it’s a mess

    The thing about Ansible is that it can be modular (if you want) and you can use other people’s code but fundamentally it runs one step at a time. You will know for each step:

    • Are dependencies met?
    • Did that step succeed or fail (in realtime!)?
    • (If it failed) what was the error?
    • (Assuming you have written sane Ansible) you can re-run your playbook at any time to get the ‘same’ result. No worries about being left in an indeterminate state
    • (To an extent) It is self-documenting
    • Host architecture doesn’t really matter
    • Target architecture/OS is specified and clear














  • with ActiveDirectory ad group policies you can centrally configure the entire windows installation to the point that it isn’t possible for a local user, even with admin to leave the domain. User groups in Linux don’t really cover the use cases for installing and uninstalling applications and configuring options within all of those applications. Yes you can do some similar stuff with, e.g. FreeIPA or even binding to AD but fundamentally you have a local system with remote admin added on.