I knew this day would come! blows the dust off my gateway machine with a P4 @ 1.6GHz Look, it’s even got a fdd, perfect for backup duty! If I could only find that Zip drive though…
Seconding the other user’s post, it’s just storage. You can use it temporarily for the Plex server but I highly recommend offloading that task to a real computer.
A used Optiplex is usually the go-to because it’s low power and capable of doing the job. Just make sure it has enough RAM to handle the containers you wanna put on it.
Docker is a little bit of learning but you’ll get the hang of it. I found docker-compose to be much easier to learn. Portainer or Dockge can help by giving you a GUI, if that’s your preferred style (like me).
The guide above doesnt include Audiobookshelf installation, but you will quickly see that adding Audiobookshelf to the basic setup is very easy. There are two things I’ve learned since the initial setup, which are worth a deviation from the guide above.
First, the recommendation in the guide to use a separate userid and groupid (1001) for the docker containers vs. your own userid/groupid (1000) is a royal PITA and not necessary for most basic use cases.
Second, and much more important, you MUST set up your VPN in a Gluetun container and then make your torrent client container a “service” of the Gluetun container. Yes, I know, that sounds like some advanced-level abstraction, but it is actually extremely easy to do and it will save you from getting a nastygram from your ISP when your VPN loses connection. The MPIAA is extremely active with automated detection and processing of torrenting data, but if you set up your VPN with Gluetun, you have a perfectly effective kill switch when your VPN connection drops. And, no, the built-in killswitch on your VPN client won’t work with containers.
I’m not super familiar with docker so im sorry im not much help there but i noticed that you mentioned a ATnT router. Are you using them as an Internet provider?
If so, you might have a carrier grade nat which makes reverse proxy like this not possible even if you do get caddy server working. I had a similar situation with my jellyfin server.
I had caddy server working but when i moved and started using a mobile internet provider, i had to use a vpn tunnel like cloudflare or zerotier to get around it.
All this to say, id recommend finding that out so if that is the case you dont spend anymore time on caddy.
ATnT should be able to tell you for sure. I remember reading about another person facing a cgnat using ATnT on reddit while i still went there so it very well could be.
And fairly easy setup yea. I did mine using a windows pc for testing as i was kinda in between places at the time and thats what i ended up using for jellyfin as well. Just lives on my media pc at the moment. The docs are pretty straight forward.
I recommend that or zero tier which is even more dead simple. Both are good but cloudflare does care about how much bandwidth you’re using so just bear that in mind if you think you’ll use the server for anything else.
Both are vpn tunnels so either should work just fine.
Self hosting can get pretty overwhelming but i find that using docs in addition to youtube videos helps a lot. I also recommend giving Linux a go when you feel up to it. It can be a very nice option if you’re working with older hardware.
Networking will take you from being “they guy that fixes computers” to full blown Telco engineer. It’s a lot though, more than I can explain. Get managed switch and start having LAN parties.
I’d go for HLS due to its simplicity: just files over http(s). VPN or not - depends on your network. If your machine is accessible from the internet, just putting the files into a webserver subdirectory with a long random path and using https will be secure enough for the usecase. Can be done with an ffmpeg oneliner.
The downside of HLS is the lag (practically – 10s or more, maybe 5 if you squeeze it hard). It is in no way realtime. Webrtc does it better (and other things too), but it is also a bigger pain to set up and forward.
Also, just in case, test that the webcam works fine if left active 24/7. I had (a cheapo) one that required a powercycle after a week or so…
I recently set up a personal Owncast instance on my home server, it should do what you’re looking for. I use OBS Studio to stream random stuff to friends, if your webcam can send RTMP streams it should be able to stream to Owncast without OBS in the middle - else, you just need to set up OBS to capture from the camera and stream to Owncast over RTMP.
the communication itself should be encrypted
I suggest having the camera/OBS and Owncast on the same local network as RTMP is unencrypted and could possibly be intercepted between the source and the Owncast server, so make sure it happens over a reasonably “trusted” network. From there, my reverse proxy (apache) serves the owncast instance to the Internet over HTTPS (using let’s encrypt or self-signed certs), so it is encrypted between the server and clients. You can watch the stream from any web browser, or use another player such as VLC pointing to the correct stream address [1]
it seems that I might need to self-host a VPN to achieve this
Owncast itself offers no authentication mechanism to watch the stream, so if you expose this to the internet directly and don’t want it public, you’d have to implement authentication at the reverse proxy level (HTTP Basic auth), or as you said you may set up a VPN server (I use wireguard) on the same machine as the Owncast instance and only expose the instance to the VPN network range (with the VPN providing the authentication layer). If you go for a VPN between your phone and owncast server, there’s also no real need to setup HTTPS at the reverseproxy level (as the VPN already provides encryption)
Of course you should also forward the correct ports (VPN or HTTPS) from your home/ISP router to the server on your LAN.
Linux is fun! Of course it’s doable. At first you’ll have a hard time and need to look up everything at ddg or whatever. But you’ll learn a lot. Go in small steps. One thing at a time. And envision the feeling you’ll get when you succeed!
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