• 5 Posts
  • 69 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • I’ve just been down this exact journey, and ended up settling on Kavita. It has all the browse, search and library stuff you’d expect. You can download or read things in the web interface. I’m only using it for epub and PDF books, but its focus is comics and manga so I expect it to shine there.

    I don’t think it does mobi, but since I use Calibre on my laptop to neaten up covers and metadata before I drop books on to the server it’s a simple matter to convert the odd mobi I end up with. Installation (using docker inside an LXC) was simple.

    It’s been a really straightforward, good experience. Highly recommend. I like it better than AudioBookshelf (which I’m already hosting for audio books) which I also tried, but didn’t like as much for inexplicable reasons. I also considered Calibre-Web, but that seemed a bit messy since I guess I’d use Calibre on my laptop to manage my books on a NAS share then serve it headless from the server with Calibre-Web? I might have that completely wrong, I didn’t spend any time looking into it because Kavita was the second thing I tried and it did exactly what I wanted.


  • It has a practical element (Hello Jellyfin, Kavita, AudioBookshelf & Syncthing), but for the rest of it, it’s about 60% hobby and 20% learning stuff that could be potentially career enhancing.

    Gnu/Linux absolutely annihilating server operating systems means that I can run the same stack, and use the same tools, that giant companies are based on. All for free. In my spare room. 1L x86 computers cost less than two packs of cigarettes! Little SSD’s are ridiculously cheap. And you don’t even need that stuff - that old laptop in your cupboard will do. Even if you kick in to donate for your software (and I recommend you do if you can) it’s a cheap hobby compared to golf or skating or whatever. Anything you need to learn there’s blog posts and videos available.

    We live in an amazing time in this hobby. I know there’s companies that would like to take it away from us, but Open Source just keeps kicking goals. Thank you FOSS developers, Gnu, Linus, FSM, Cthulhu and the other forces in the universe that make this possible.



  • I don’t sew, but a follow several people who do (for vintage and modern clothing) on Instagram - just to emotionally vampire off their irrepressible happiness when it all comes together and they make something that comes out as great as they imagined (lots of “and it has pockets!!!” moments) or they master a new skill they had been struggling with - like sewing button holes in denim or whatever.

    It’s not for me, but I love the obvious satisfaction and joy other people are getting out of it.



  • Your head might be spinning from all the different advice you’re getting - don’t worry, there are a lot of options and lots of folk are jumping in with genuinely good (and well meaning) advice. I guess I’ll add my two cents, but try and explain the ‘why’ of my thinking.

    I’m assuming from your questions you know your way around a computer, can figure things out, but haven’t done much self-hosting. If I’m wrong about that, go ahead and skip this suggestion.

    • Jellyfin good - a common gateway drug to homelabbing, and the only thing you’ll do that non-tech friends will appreciate
    • Proxmox good - it makes the backups simple and provides a path forward for all sorts of things
    • Docker good - you’ve said it increases complexity; this is correct in that you’re adding more layers of stuff, but it reduces your complexity of management by removing a heap of dependency issues. There is a compute and memory overhead involved, but it’s small and the tradeoff is worth it.
    • VM good - yes an LXC is more efficient, but it’s harder to run docker in. Save that for a future project
    • Media data somewhere else good - I run a separate NAS with an SMB share. A NAS in a VM is a compromise, but like all things self hosting, you start out with what you’ve got. I let Jellyfin keep the metadata in the VM that’s hosting my Jellyfin though since the NAS is over the network. That’s less of a consideration if you are visualizing your NAS on the same machine, but I’d still do it my way for future proofing.
    • Passthrough magic not yet - this can also be a future project. If your metal has quicksync that can be utilized to reduce the CPU load, but that can also be a future project.


  • I have a very similar setup. Jellyfin in Docker on a Debian VM (2 cores, 8GB RAM), and all the media on the NAS. The CIFS/SMB from the NAS is mounted in fstab. I keep all the metadata locally for speed - ie not on the NAS. I don’t like the extra layer of running Docker, but it works like a charm whereas I had a few hassles running Jellyfin natively in the VM. I do have a special ‘media’ user with the name and password in the mount command which only has permissions for the media.

    Can’t comment on the arrs suite since I get all my linux distros on those disks attached to the front of magazines.