Unencrypted HTTP can mean that anyone can see your traffic as it passes through their network. Your ISP will see that traffic. If you’re streaming pirated music and you’re in a country that cares about those things, might not go very well. From a security stand point though, you still wouldn’t want to trust the authentication on the open port. A vulnerability may exist that you don’t know about. It’s always better to keep them closed and add another layer or two between your home computer and the public.

Tailscale let’s you tunnel into your home network without opening any ports, and it encrypts the traffic. Much safer way of doing it.

Go on…

What kinda issues are you having? Most of my problems with Nix are solved with overlays or creating a module. Admittedly, in order to do that you still have to know how to fix your issue the usual linux way. Afterall, Nix is more of an abstraction tool IMO; good for replicating something across a ton if devices. If you don’t need that, there’s other distros that work much better out of the box.

Another tip, please be very careful when exposing ports to the public. With docker you’re already mitigating your attack surfaces but an open port allows anyone to make a connection and there are lots of bots out there looking for open ports and vulnerabilities. A good alternative would be to setup wireguard and instead then connect through that or if you like simplicity check out Tailscale.

Use nix repl! That stands for Read Eval Print Loop. You can evaluate a nix expression and see all the attributes inside. For example, on a non-flake system, use :l <nixpkgs/nixos> inside the repl to load the current system. Then you can hit the tab key to show whats inside of the current attribute set, make sure you have a . at the end. Then you can press enter to evaluate and see the declaration. For example when you set networking.hostName in configuration.nix you can actually find it under options.networking.hostName.value evaluating that in the repl.

Imo the worst part of nix is how it turns into this chicken or the egg scenario. Let me explain, nix is very good at reproducing things. It ensures that all things are the same when installing a piece of software. Once someone writes a nix module, generally speaking, it “just works”. You can always take that nix file and get it to run the same way on another machine. But since most gamers/musicians don’t give two shits about reproducible software, it doesn’t get packaged. And with no packages they will never be interested to get into nix.

As I write this though I realize, many open source projects have struggled with getting contributions from the community. Personally, I just think nix solves the issue of “idk, it works on my machine” better than anything I’ve seen. Being able to reproduce software and stop dependency issues is a very valuble thing, just not for everyone.

Hey this is a great web server example! Instead of commenting it out to enable or disable you can actually turn it into a full module. Check out this example of a nix module. Basically, you can take your code you pasted and put it under the config set. Then create an option to enable that set of code. Now you can always have this nix file imported, but enable the option only when you need it with another declaration. Really, that’s how all the declarations work you’re just getting the nix files from github and nixpkgs.

Don’t, you can still install nix into Garuda. Works great as a separate package manager that won’t get in the way.

I think the problem is that most people dive right in and go to NixOS which has its quirks as a linux OS (see FHS). The Nix language is great at building and moving source code between computers, really any big collection of binaries. If you don’t do that, try just using the nix-shell command to instantly run a piece of software without installing it. You can write a shell.nix file to hop into and out of an environment with whatever software you need. Once you can write a couple .nix files then move onto NixOS; which after all is just a big collection of binaries.

Okay… one is closed sourced and the other open. That much I know. With those points out of the way, why is jellyfish superior?

What happened with Emby? I’ve used their service for a long time and have been very happy with their lifetime premium.