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! 🥰

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

    Is Jellyfin running on the VPS too or only NetBird? Sorry for the stupid question. 🙏

    I just saw that they discourage forwarding ports directly over the internet, which, I guess, is fair, since we’re not using ssh or other encrypted protocols here - although if we are able to use https, then I don’t quite follow…

    So! I’m considering giving your setup a try! Is their free plan sufficient? Is the layout then something like:

    My mom’s client ===> VPS (NetBird, I guess any port forwarding and/or routing happens here?) ===> My Jellyfin server + storage

    ? 😊

    • Leon@pawb.socialEnglish
      2·
      10 hours ago

      I have two servers. There’s the VPS hosted by Hetzner, and then I have my own home server sitting on a shelf in my hallway. The home server has all of my data and private apps, like Jellyfin, Navidrome, Audiobookshelf, etc. Then I pipe traffic via Netbird on my Hetzner VPS to my home server. Since Netbird goes via Wireguard, it’s a VPN connection and I don’t expose anything to the public.

      The one exception to this are game servers that I host. Those are pointed directly to my home network, and I only give that out to friends. Still, it’s a possible attack surface.

      I self-host Netbird, so I’m not familiar with how they work as a host. Netbird when used as a reverse proxy also handles all the SSL certificates and whatnot. It’s basically a front for Traefik, with convenient VPN tunneling built in.