In their comments to a recent post that I made, asking people to share their torrenting ratios, some folks were talking about how they have setup media servers for their parents. This sounded really cool and I would like to do the same thing for my family.

I simply mount my torrenting drives with sshfs and consume media with mpv, because I don’t need anything else. But for my technologically less inclined family members, I guess setting up something with a GUI would be kind and nice.

I am torrenting on a VPN router, behind which there is a switch that only switches a specific port - which I rotate regularly for safety - to a public facing router, so that I can ssh into my home network.

Questions:

  • I have no experience with or knowledge of these to me fancy sounding GUI projects. For instance, do my family members create accounts that I then approve? Do I need to install and setup something on their endpoints (for instance, to configure which port to use, etc.) or is it simple enough for the layperson to do this themselves?
  • Will the fancy stuff accept and be accessible with port forwarding from my public facing router to my VPN router and then into my torrenting rig just like my ssh server does or am I going to have to set this up directly connected to the public facing router?

Please give me your most straightforward recommendations! 🥰

    • anewfox@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      9 days ago

      ideally you’d setup wireguard (or whatever) for them to use so you’re not just opening ports to the entire internet. i use jellyfin and like it a lot, but the real major issue with jellyfin is explaining to your elderly mother how to setup and use wireguard on her smart tv.

      • cheeso@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        8 days ago

        how would you do that? wireguard requires opening a port unless you use a middle server where you open the port on that and at that point maybe netbird would be an easier option

          • cheeso@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            2·
            7 days ago

            i see

            you could also open http/s ports and use nginx proxy manager, which encrypts connections using TLS

              • black0ut@pawb.socialEnglish
                2·
                6 days ago

                Take a look at Caddy if nginx seems too complicated.

                Caddy is designed primarily to act as a reverse proxy, and it can automatically set up your certificates with Let’s Encrypt (as long as you have it listening on ports 80 and 443).

                You’d only need to set up a domain pointing to your IP, but you can do that for free and without a permanent IP by using a DDNS (like duckdns)

                The jellyfin website has instructions on how to set it up with Caddy. I recommend using the Caddyfile.

                • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
                  1·
                  2 days ago

                  Thanks! I’ll check it out! I actually have a domain at NoIP, but some list(s) uBlock Origin seem to be blocking it, so maybe they are a little anti-consumer? xD I’ll check out duckdns!

                  • black0ut@pawb.socialEnglish
                    2·
                    2 days ago

                    Some lists will blanket flag all DDNS providers. It’s not malicious per se, there are reasons to block them.

                    They’re free, they allow registration with just a mail and a password, and they also allow hosting sites from residential addresses. So some scammers abuse the service for scamming.

                    It’s not super common, and normally all these services try to take down malicious users and scammers, but it’s the reason why these domains can be in anti-scam and anti-spam lists.

                    For normal media server or website hosting, it’s usually not a problem (unless you have one of those special uBlock lists, but by default I can tell you duckdns isn’t blocked, and I don’t think NoIP is either).

                    If you want to host something that requires federation, you may start getting into issues with some instances, if they have some of those filter lists. But at that point, getting a static IP or a VPS and a real domain pointed to it is the best choice.

      • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
        1·
        7 days ago

        Right. I still haven’t learned how to setup wireguard yet… how then would my parents do it. xD I’d help them of course, but first I have to learn it myself.