Kushan

You’ve been making shit up since this whole debate started. You’re the textbook definition of “perfection is the enemy of good enough” because 99% of people will find that a VPN is good enough but according to you they’re worthless.

Please don’t tell me what I am focusing on, when I haven’t even said it

I literally quoted you, so don’t try playing the “I never actually said that” card.

It’s ironic that you’re now complaining about context and strawmen when you yourself started it with the whole “anyone who wants to know who you are…” argument. This mysterious “anyone” is the ultimate strawman because they’re anonymous and all encompassing. Meanwhile, you have zero idea what anyone wants from their VPN’s so you’re making the broad, sweeping statements while lacking any context yourself.

A dumb take is, to pay for something you might get nothing from

And which VPN provider is it you’re getting “nothing” from? There seems to be a budding market for VPN’s out there, lots of people are paying for them and continue to do so, why do you think that is? Because the whole world is stupid and it’s a pointless waste of money? Or because they are actually in fact getting some kind of use from them?

VPN’s have a myriad of uses, you’re focusing on some ambiguous nation-state attacker tracking you down for whatever reason. Meanwhile, quite a lot of users would just like to watch porn without having to submit ID. I’d say they’re getting plenty of use out of their VPN for that.

Yes locks on your door are pointless because if someone wants to break into your house they’re going to do it once way or another, especially if you leave the window open

This is a dumb take.

You know exactly what I’m referring to

Yeah this sucks but honestly it never really worked well for me, ebooks are horribly underserved in the media world.

Yeah I think your problem was trying to use ~ in a path. That’s a bash thing, not a linux thing - slightly pedantic distinction for many but worth knowing about in case future applications give you a similar problem.

Don’t set it to your home path, set the path explicitly. That’ll be what it’s complaining about, the ~.

It shouldn’t really matter where you’ve got your files as long as they’re mounted on a standard path. Maybe try creating a symlink from where your media is to a standard path like /mnt/media or something?

Hmm sorry not sure why it would be complaining about an invalid path. Is it all paths that are invalid, or just the ones to your media?

I don’t think you should be getting downvotes for having an opinion and I appreciate your reply.

However I do love a good debate - what’s the advantages for you for installing apps on “bare metal” (I’m assuming you mean a base OS install rather than actual bare metal). What about virtualisation?

I’m also on emby and it works well for me. My main grievance is setting up a new device is a chore, “emby connect” is far too clunky to use so I end up configuring via URL every time - and on some devices that’s a real chore.

What’s wrong with docker?

Let’s not rewrite history, 20 years ago desktop Linux was an absolute shit show.

XMPP is a mess as well.

Okay, so I think I can help with this a little.

The “secret sauce” of Docker / containers is that they’re very good at essentially lying to the contents of the container and making it think it has a whole machine to itself. By that I mean the processes running in a container will write to say /config and be quite content to write to that directory but docker is secretly redirecting that write to somewhere else. Where that “somewhere else” is, is known as a “volume” in docker terminology and you can tell it exactly where you want that volume to be. When you see a command with -vin it, that’s a volume map - so if you see something like -v /mnt/some/directory:/config in there - that’s telling docker "when this container tries to write to /config, redirect it to /mnt/some/directory instead.

That way you can have 10 containers all thinking they’re each writing to their own special /config folder but actually they can all be writing to somewhere unique that you specify. That’s how you get the container to read and write to files in specific locations you care about, that you can backup and access. That’s how you get persistence.

There’s other ways of specifying “volumes”, like named volumes and such but don’t worry too much about those, the good ol’ host path mapping is all you need in 99% of cases.

If you don’t specify a volume, docker will create one for you so the data can be written somewhere but do not rely on this - that’s how you lose data, because you’ll invariably run some docker clean command to recover space and delete an unused unnamed volume that had some important data in it.

It’s exactly the same way docker does networking, around port mapping - you can map any port on your host to the port the container cares about. So a container can be listening on port 80 but actually it’s being silently redirected by the docker engine to port 8123 on your host using the -p 8123:80 argument.

Now, as for updates - once you’ve got your volumes mapped (and the number and location of them will depend on the container itself - but they’re usually very well documented), the application running in the container will be writing whatever persistence data it needs to those folders. To update the application, you just need to pull a newer version of the docker container, then stop the old one and start it again - it’ll start up using the “new” container. How well updates work really depends on the application itself at this point, it’s not really something docker has any control over but the same would be if you were running via LXC or apt-get or whatever - the application will start up, read the files and hopefully handle whatever migrations and updates it needs to do.

It’s worth knowing that with docker containers, they usually have labels and tags that let you specify a specific version if you don’t want it updating. The default is an implied :latest tag but for something like postgress which has a slightly more involved update process you will want to use a specific tag like postgres:14.3 or whatever.

Hope that helps!

What is it you’re struggling to understand? Like is there a concept or command or something that just isn’t clicking?

I know it’s not helpful or what you’re asking for but honestly, just learn docker and all of these kinds of problems just go away.

Once you learn to spin up one docker container, you can spin up nearly any of them (there’s a couple of extra steps if you need GPU acceleration, things like that).

You’ll be kicking yourself that you didn’t hadn’t the jump earlier. Sounds like you’re already using Linux too, so it’s really not that big a leap.

Yup I also use ntfy and it’s brilliant, easy to send notification events to it from almost anything and the android app is very responsive.

Another vote for restic, best backup software I’ve ever used.