I think what you’re trying to do is called a VPN. Set up a VPN that tunnels all the torrent traffic to and from the virtual server.

Most people use either Matrix or XMPP. Both work.

There is a nice overview of chat protocols here: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/

I mostly use matrix as of today. I think it’s alright. It’s a bit difficult to explain encryption and device verification to other people… I think that could be designed better. But apart from that it works very well. So does XMPP which I’ve used before that. Have a look at the messenger matrix and all the options before deciding on an ecosystem. I’d take one of the friends and do some evaluation before dragging the whole group in. You can do that with some pre-existing servers before learning how to host the server part.

Sure. I usually do the same thing. The laptop on which I’m typing right now is a refurbished Dell one and I really prefer a bit older enterprise hardware to new consumer hardware. Nice build quality, no nonsense and Linux runs great on that device. And it cost me a fraction of a new machine. However… with the intended use-case of a media center I’m not sure. Intel always adds hardware acceleration in their iGPUs and the modern codecs are quite demanding. I wouldn’t buy an older generation that doesn’t really support AV1. I’m not sure if hardware from 2 years ago can do that. And if someone buys a new TV set which supports HDR or something and then the recently bought, refurbished media center is out of date again… that also doesn’t help. Maybe I’d buy a new one in this case and just use it for the next 10 years. That’s also sustainable. But yeah, you have to pay attention to the details if you’re buying off-brand. But that also applies to most computer hardware, regardless. It’s a bit more of a lottery with cheap and off-brand devices.

Add some googly eyes if it “lives” in the living room. They fit right above the switch which would then become the nose.

Yeah back when I needed storage (quite some years ago) the mini pcs were less capable and more pricey, so I ended up building a NAS myself. It’s a regular, yet very power efficient PC. But due to size, it doesn’t fit next to the TV. If I’d do the same thing today, I’d certainly consider a machine like this. And $200 doesn’t sound much for a 2-bay NAS.

Uuhh, that’s a cute little trash can. Now fit that with the maximum of RAM it supports and two 12TB harddrives… And it’ll do more media center and NAS than the average person needs.

Someone linked a list of Mini-PCs here: https://lemmy.world/post/19837516

I think the N100 sounds good. But I can’t comment on buying a cheap chinesium one versus a refurbished Fujitsu/Lenovo or an Intel NUC.

Sure. I’d say the price is alright if they manage everything for you. There is some labor involved in designing such a platform, packaging the applications, maintaining the infrastructure, preparing updates etc and offering support of an application level. If they do that, it’s probably worth the additional bucks. I maintain some services myself and get away way cheaper. But there is a substancial investment in time to learn webhosting and maintaining stuff.

Not sure. The website looks alright. I always have a look at the contact details and see if it’s a proper company. It says K&T is a brand name of “Operation Enterprise” which doesn’t give any results when googling it. So I’d be wary. But check for yourself.

You can just pay for a month and see what happens? But I’d add: $11.25 USD isn’t very cheap for a VPS with that specifications. For that price you could also pick lots of other hosting providers. You’d just have to set up Lemmy yourself.

Does anyone happen to know if there is a N100 model that supports HDMI-CEC so I can make my old TV set smart with a recent Kodi and maybe some retro-games? But I’d rather not let it consume 9W or whatever such a machine needs all day long. So it’d need to start and shut down on its own. Preferably without manual additional steps involved, hence the CEC…

For AI training? Or why would someone specifically pay attention to watermarks? I believe there are curated datasets out there. And watermark detectors to weed out watermarked pictures from a pile of data. I don’t think the general public sorts by presence of watermarks…
And I’m not sure about games and webcomics. They all have some logo somewhere, because they’ve been made by someone. If you don’t want that, you’re looking for white-label products. I think in the realm of privacy, and those product types, that’s a small to non-existent niche.

Do you install the CA certificate or the client certificate? Because both aren’t the same. The app needs to authenticate with a client certificate file. The server has a server certificate that is checked against the CA certificate. So you’d install that (CA) in the android system certificate store and additionally give a client certificate file to the app.

I have a NFS and Samba share to my NAS. And Jellyfin exports things via DLNA / UPnP so there is always a local route to the storage. Also I’ve set the IP address of the server in the /etc/hosts file of my router. So even when internet is down, the DNS can resolve it.

Ah okay. I don’t have a Fritzbox here. I suppose that does the trick. My idea was to use that to test if incoming IPv6 works. So disregard any services on the Fritzbox itself and just see if you can access it directly. And if yes, configure an IPv6 port forward to the NAS.

Isn’t myfritz plain old IPv6 directly to the router without any proxying or tunneling? If yes, communication would mean IPv6 packets make their way through the ISP to the router.

If you google it, you’ll find lots of similar questions for O2. I think you have to contact their customer support and get that activated once.

And have a look at your IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Sometimes you can do it via IPv6 already, just not over IPv4 because there is some translation in the way. (In case they want too much money to give you a real IPv4 address.)

Maybe you can try if you can open your FritzBox UI from the outside with your my.fritz address. I think that has IPv6 and a port forward in place (if activated).

And btw: It’s perfectly fine to do it. People need storage and online collaboration. Access to their data while away.

Maybe you can find some more discussion and the reasoning in their documentation or Github issues or pull requests. I bet this has been discussed before someone implemented it. Maybe there’s also a way to restore the old behaviour.

What’s your bubble of interests? I mean I’ve seen Github projects where that description fits very VERY well. Usually when I’m attending to some very niche hobbies. Or try to get some exotic electronics from 20 years ago running again… With the everyday tools it’s most of the times some active community and I copy and paste the 3 commands and I have it installed successfully.

We also had expensive engineering software at university. Oftentimes it’s a major PITA for everyone. The PhD students have to get their work done and are met by the software refusing to start because all licenses are taken. Sometimes someone forgot to log off or the computer crashed and the software takes most of the day to recover that license. Or some people do like 5 simulations in parallel. Or lock the computer, go home and block a license. The IT department will get lots of calls and have to deal with it. Especially when the pool of licenses is small. And it takes additinal effort to coordinate practical courses and excercises where you teach a group of 24 people which then need half the license pool available at a fixed time each week, despite the daily routine of everyone else.

And I’m not even sure if the people responsible, care too much for pirated software. But they’re liable. Of course they write strongly worded mails when talking to everyone. It’s their IT infrastructure and they can’t have people do illegal things with it. Especially not while having an expensive contract with some supplyer. They can’t have anyone leak a mail where they endorse piracy. Or post screenshots or turn in assignments or papers with screenshots that say “unregistered copy” in the bottom corner. And once students do silly things and the piracy is on display publicly, they’ll have to do something. Usually that’s writing a strongly worded email first. Because that takes next to no effort. I think the usual IT department doesn’t care if things go smoothly, people do their various things and no one complains. They usually have other stuff to do. That makes me think in this story something must have happened that warranted some form of public reaction or at least show they addressed it and they have it in writing.

And I think the rest of the mail fits such IT people. They said why they do it and that they can’t have piracy connected to the institutes name. They say they need some incoming complaints to justify buying more licenses. And the punishment fits the crime. They just disconnect the computer from their network and it’s not their problem anymore. I think that’s fair.

That’s a good idea. I think it’s a bit problematic under these circumstances since OP wants to host game files which are probably some larger binaries. And that’s going to show a different usage pattern and more traffic than the usual code. I don’t know if they monitor things like that and remove these repos. But I have to remember that idea.

And an idea regarding the links: I’ve tried some emulators and do some retrogaming every now and the. Usually these projects take some care to not list the sites with the ROM collections on their official pages. As a user you usually go to archive.org and download things from there or scroll through their forum or subreddit and that kind of info pops up pretty quickly. So once they have an active community it spreads via word of mouth. Maybe you can also post a sticky you’re not affiliated with websites like X and Y, but you’d have to ask a lawyer if that’s alright.

I guess some people just don’t care and do it anyways. And I’m not sure how much the copyright industry and courts care about people chatting about copyright infringement and not actually doing it at that place. Could be protected by free spech in some jurisdictions. You can obviously live in a place that doesn’t care about copyright. But I guess people don’t move across the world just for that.

You could find bulletproof hosting pay anonymously and take care to never mention any personal information about you. But given what you said, that’s not what you want. I’d split responsibility between several people and let someone else do the copyright infringement. Someone who lives someplace else and doesn’t engage themselves on the website. And focus on the development and the legal aspect of it. Or just do the illegal part and not do the software. But I imaging it’s really complicated to do both sides of that coin in one person… And I suppose running an illegal website costs more money than running a regular one.