Depends on the type of fiber and all that. It can be insanely complex.

But this is possible, yes.

You are the subset of people who happen to be in a situation where they’re working as they should. I’m going to guess that you’re not in North America, and live somewhere with 240v power outlets.

In any country that uses 120v, usually it’s split phase power, and if your powerline adapters are sharing a phase with something that’s inductive or crossing the split in the phase, generally they’re going to be rubbish. So you basically need a degree in electrical engineering to figure out what circuits are on what side of the split phase, and what is on each circuit that may be an inductive load, and could interfere, just for them to perform like they should.

There’s a whole lot more to it, and I’m simplifying a lot here, but that’s the overview of the problem.

With UK power circuits, there are fewer breakers and everything is fed from a single phase of 240v. That makes it much more likely that you’ll have a good experience with powerline. Just have to avoid the circuit with stuff like your air conditioner (if you have one) and stuff like the fridge, and generally you do quite well with powerline.

Ethernet is still better tho. Heh.

This is the information I couldn’t really squeeze in without side tracking my entire point.

There are “good” extenders, that use different channels/radios, but the cheap ones people buy are not those.

This is correct. You might want to look into a point of entry filter for MoCA, since you don’t want to share your Internet with your neighbors.

Last time I looked, which was a while ago, I couldn’t really find any, but hopefully that’s been sorted out in your area.

Basically the point of entry filter stops the signals from the MoCA link from crossing, so you would want to put that between the outside box and the first splitter.

Wi-Fi is convenient more than anything. You just have to know the right passphrase and as long as you are in range, you can get in… In most cases.

When it comes to WiFi, I’m a fan of many smaller and lower power access points vs a few high powered ones. This is rarely the case in residential situations though. Most people buy a single, high powered Wi-Fi in the form of a all-in-one wireless router, and call it a day, then almost exclusively use Wi-Fi and wonder why it sucks, then go buy a newer more powerful unit once one is available.

My motto is: wire when you can, wireless when you have to. Devices like laptops, tablets and phones, usually do not have Ethernet built in, or are too mobile to make it practical to use. Meanwhile anything that doesn’t move, like TVs, desktops, etc, need a wire run once, and it will work perfectly until the building falls over.

That’s a lot of return on the investment of running the cable once.

I usually prefer all home runs (everything going back to a central point) but networking is diverse, so using a cable to get to an area, then using a switch to serve that area is entirely valid. Just don’t Daisy chain too many switches or your going to have a bad time. Whether that link is copper, fiber, MoCA/coax, doesn’t matter… As long as it’s reliable and fast.

In any case, I have at least 8 access points serving my home, and they need to be moved, since I still have one spot that’s a dead zone.

This is the way.

Alien can be boiled down to simply meaning “foreign”. As in, not coming from the wire bundle that is used for the connection.

Crosstalk is the term usually used for interference coming from other pairs in the same bundle, which should be minimal due to the electrical/magnetic properties associated with twisted pair.

Alien interference is any inference from an outside source, usually by inducing a current on the Ethernet pairs, that shouldn’t be present. Usually this results in corruption of the data in transit or a failure to sync (and establish a connection at all).

No extra terrestrial interference was meant to be implied; though, I’m not excluding the extra terrestrials from creating interference; I’m sure if such beings exist and are here, they could interfere, but that wasn’t the intention of my statement.

Alien inference is a very common term in wireline networking. I’m surprised you haven’t heard it.

You’re quick.

Thanks for the assist. This is what I’m referring to.

As a network guy: Ethernet over power lines can be fine, but you basically need to be an electrician, and have a working knowledge of how powerline Ethernet works before you can get there.

Even if you do, or stumble into a working setup by accident, you can absolutely end up with all kinds of bad things happening because power lines are notoriously bad with crosstalk and EMI, both on the wire and emitted from it.

If you absolutely cannot do rj45/Ethernet runs, and WiFi isn’t viable for whatever reason (or even if it is), look into MoCA. Thank me later.

It won’t cost you any more than powerline, and you’ll get a cleaner signal, more consistent performance, and overall a better experience.

In order of preference, I prefer the following connection options:

• fiber
• Ethernet
• MoCA
• Wi-Fi
• powerline

Fiber, not because it’s faster or better (there are many ways it’s actually worse than Ethernet), but because it’s almost impossible to interfere with, unless someone physically disconnects the cable (or breaks/cuts it). As long as the line is protected from damage, it will give the most consistent performance.

Ethernet, more robust than fiber in terms of physical disability, can be faster at propagating data (the time it takes to get from one end of the cable to the other), but only works over relatively short runs (100m or less, by spec), and it’s susceptible to alien interference and crosstalk. However, it is far more rugged than fiber.

MoCA is half duplex but shares a lot of the benefits of Ethernet. The main improvement here is that coax is commonly present in most homes already, while Ethernet is relatively uncommon in homes, so many homes are already wired in a way that works with MoCA.

Wi-Fi is also half duplex, it can go faster than Ethernet under the right conditions (which are almost impossible to achieve in real world conditions). Propagation is as fast as Ethernet but it has more overhead, and it is much more prone to interference from other Wi-Fi networks or other things operating on the same, unlicensed, bands.

Powerline should only be considered if all of the other options are disqualified for some reason.

Also, anyone using wifi extenders (not talking about mesh or anything, just actual Wi-Fi extenders), should probably not be doing that. Wi-Fi extenders are often just retransmitting the packets on the same wifi channel, which dramatically cuts the available bandwidth. You’ll end up with a stronger connection, but a much slower one.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

What about piefediles?

It really doesn’t do much and the cost is barely pennies per user when you operate at scale. The largest costs will be for the DNS resolver service and the domain registration, both of which you are already required to have, in order to have a functioning presence on the Internet. The cost of the issuing intermediate certificate is probably the largest single cost of the whole operation.

To be fair to Plex, they run some intermediary (caching) metadata servers to offload the demand their users put on services like the tvdb and IMDb. Honestly, is probably not required… But they do it. (I’ve seen their caching system fail more often than either site, so, it’s not all good), but even with that, you can put most of that load into your existing webhost, and it’s unlikely to make an impact on performance.

When you do this stuff at scale, the costs of simply having it set up, usually cover the costs of using it for thousands, if not tens of thousands of users.

I have two pieces of paper from my time in post-secondary education. One says information technology, the other says business. I’ve worked in an IT field for well over 10 years in a B2B capacity. I’ve had to handle cost/benefit and ROI arguments with customers, and justify having them spend incredible amounts for their own good.

Are we done dick measuring about what we think we know?

Listen, we’re not going to agree on this. I couldn’t give any fewer shits if you do or not. Bluntly, I’m unbothered.

Good day to you sir.

I have a very good knowledge of business operations.

They already offered Plex pass to earn their income. Plex is an extremely price elastic product, given that alternatives like jellyfin exist. They are taking features away, and charging people if they don’t want to lose those features. That’s a really good way to piss off your existing userbase (or customer base). Better would be to offer something new, and charge for that. Keep existing products at the same cost, but have “better” products at a premium. You won’t get a huge number of people buying the extended product, but it will likely be more new paying users than how many you would get with the crap they’re doing now, and they wouldn’t lose any customers in the process.

When you understand the social and economic factors here, this is a super idiotic move. When you’re only looking at how many dollars you can extract from the customer base, this is a golden idea… I mean, it will fail, but it looks golden if you’re only looking at the money numbers.

I would question whether you know how a business works (or whether Plex does, for that matter).

As far as I’m concerned, Plex failed to read the room. They were already walking a fine line with the people in a legal grey area, which comprised a good amount of their customer base (those that are sharing media at least). There’s a nontrivial number of people who share media that are rather paranoid with reason. Nobody wants the RIAA/MPAA to have any reason to investigate what you are doing on the Internet. We all know how well that goes from the whole Napster thing. So now than a few are almost tinfoil hat level of paranoid. Many have already jumped ship to jellyfin or something similar. The rest are either unconcerned, not paying attention, or simply don’t care. I would argue that the numbers of people who run servers currently that host content using Plex, that are not looking at alternatives because of this, is pretty damned low.

Plex alienated the group that brought everyone into their umbrella. When the people who host media entirely abandon their product because of this shit, their client base vaporizes.

Can’t have a product or company with no clients. At least, not for long.

I am also a Plex pass person. Multiple times over in fact. I actually have a dedicated account for my server administrator that’s separate from the account I use to watch content. Both have Plex pass lifetime.

I’ve been familiar with this coming down the pipeline for a while and because I have Plex pass, I too, am unaffected, as are my users.

At the same time: here is a piece of software that I paid for. It’s “server” software, sure, but it’s just a software package. What it does isn’t really relevant. The fact is that it processes data stored on my systems, processing by my systems, using my hardware, and sends that data over the Internet, using the Internet connection I pay for separately, and delivers that data directly to the people I’ve designated as capable of doing so.

The only part of this process that Plex, the company, has any involvement in, is limited to: issuing an SSL certificate, managing user accounts and passwords, and brokering where to find data (pointers to my systems).

You can get a free SSL certificate from let’s encrypt. User accounts, authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), is a function of pretty much everything that you remotely connect to, whether a Windows SMB/cifs share, your email, even logging into your own local computer regardless of OS… And honestly, brokering the connection isn’t dissimilar to how torrent trackers work, DNS or a goddamned IP address punched into a browser.

They’re offering shockingly little for what they’re asking, and the only thing that’s on the list that would be costly in the slightest is having a DNS name for the server (registration of the domain, DNS services, etc). And given the scale that they’re doing these things at, the individual costs per name is literally pennies per year.

This is not a good look at all.

I have domain names coming out of my ears. I’m tempted to buy one more and just offer to anyone that wants it, to have a subdomain name under that to run their Plex alternative on, so you can get a let’s encrypt SSL certificate, and stay safe on the Internet. I don’t want the feds snooping into what totally legal Linux ISOs are being shared.

I just don’t know how to program at all, so I have no idea how I would go about setting up a system for that. The concept would be to automate it, and have people create an account, then request a DNS name under one of my DNS domains, and have a setting if you want it to have an A record, AAAA record, or cname (if you have a ddns setup). Once the request is in, it would connect to be DNS provider and add the record for you.

The part I’d want to have as a check on the system is to make sure that you’re hosting jellyfin or something from the address you submit, to prevent people from using it for unrelated purposes; but even with that… Do I care of people do that? Probably not. I would limit how many addresses you can have per account.

I just upgraded to a Xeon E5 v4 processor.

I think the max RAM on it is about 1.5 TiB per processor or something.

It’s not new, but it’s not that old either. Still cost me a pretty penny.

One thing that was recommended to me by someone a while ago, is that, unless you need it for something specific, mount your media in Plex as read only.

Plex has functions where you can delete content from the library from their UI. If you need that for some reason, obviously don’t make it read only. If you’re hoarding the data, and therefore never delete it, or use an external system for deleting files, then RO all the way.

The only caveat to this is if you’re using a local disk on the Plex system, which then shares out the drive/folder for adding new content, in which case, you’re screwed. It has to be rw so the OS can add/remove data.

In my case, as I think may be common (or at least, not rare), my back end data for Plex Media is on a NAS, so it’s easy to simply have the system running Plex, mount that network share as RO, and you’re done. The data on the NAS can be accessed and managed by other systems RW, direct to the NAS.

Since Plex is exposed to the internet, if anyone with sufficient rights is compromised, in theory, an attacker could delete the entire contents of your media folder with it. If you limit RW access to internal systems only, then that risk can be effectively mitigated.

Depends on the UPS. Many cheap offline UPS units don’t. Anything line interactive or online will.

APC makes low end offline UPS units, which are cheap garbage.

They also make line interactive and online ups units, which are decidedly not completely garbage.

I pick up line interactive APC units from used locations like eBay, and go buy off label replacement batteries. Haven’t had any problems with them so far.

To date, over the last ~10 years of running a homelab, I have used mainly SMT 1500 units, one was a rack mount. I’ve recently upgraded to an SMX2000. I’ve replaced batteries, but never a UPS, and never any server components due to power issues. I’ve run servers ranging from a Dell PE 2950, to a full c6100 chassis, plus several networking devices, including firewalls, routers and PoE switches. Not a single power related issue with any of them.

I’m just happy that Lemmy.ca made the list.

Yay centralization!