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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 2nd, 2025

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  • I’ve had the opposite experience with Mikrotik.

    I really wanted to like it, but (I say this as a former Cisco instructor) their approach to UI and documentation is terrible (the docs don’t tell you what’s what, just tell you how to setup a specific config, without explaining what they’re doing or why, even worse, they start numbering their eth interfaces from 1 - it took me a while to figure this out).

    Worse, it was unstable as hell. I setup one just as a test, with one laptop connected via ethernet. Every couple days I wouldn’t be able to even ping the laptop - I’d have to reboot the router, manually, since it had become unresponsive.

    This with a simple config (just eth2 is LAN, eth1 is external), and no rules.

    It may have been a faulty unit, but as a consumer I can’t risk assuming this, especially given the very poor docs and clumsy UI/config approach - it all indicates this is a very immature product, definitely not something I’d recommend to a newbie.

    I hope they can really improve - the form factor is excellent, the price point is unbeatable, the capabilites of the hardware are extensive.








  • It’s transcoding because Jellyfin decided it needs to transcode for some reason, frustratingly. I’ve converted to formats/codecs I know the TV supports, and yet Jellyfin still transcodes, with a message about the TV not supporting the codec (yet if I play the file on the TV from a thumb drive, it works fine with the crappy built-in media player). I’m using the Jellyfin client on the TV because it’s easy to install without a Samsung account, and I don’t think I can get Kodi on it (besides my experience with Kodi is not great, it’s sluggish on real hardware, I can only imagine how bad it would be on an underpowered garbage TV and I don’t know if a client exists).

    From a bigger picture perspective, I think Jellyfin as a client will be better for my family. It’s a simpler interface with less to get them in trouble.

    I’ll need transcoding for other/non-local devices anyway, so I still have to address the issue (annoying iPad for example).

    If you have any advice about troubleshooting why it’s transcoding, I’m all ears. This is the first I’ve gotten Jellyfin to work after multiple attempts over the years, across multiple servers and clients, so my experience with it is limited. I’m just glad it works at all - it’s the first I’ve gotten to work other than Plex.

    Thanks - at least now I know it shouldn’t be transcoding.






  • Oh, I hear ya on the space issue - there’s almost no space in this SFF, but I like it’s form factor so I’m willing to compromise.

    Anymore I don’t find RAID very useful, except for mirroring a drive. As I say this, I do have a NAS with 5 drives, but it’s used as one of my replicators as it’s too slow for anything else. I did run Proxmox with RAID for a while, that was pretty cool, I just don’t need all it’s capability.

    These days I can get a large enough single drive for a box - I considered getting a 12TB but the price on the 8 was hard to beat and I won’t be filling it anytime soon.


  • My experience after 35 years in IT: I’ve had 10x more outages caused by automatic updates than everything else combined.

    Also after 35 years of running my own stuff at home, and practically never updating anything, I’ve never had an outage caused by a lack of updates.

    Let’s not act like auto updates is without risk. Just look at how often Microsoft has to roll out a fix for something an update broke. Inexperienced users are going to be clueless when an update breaks something.

    We should be teaching new people how to manage systems, this includes proper update checks on a cycle, with appropriate validation that everything works afterwards, and the ability to roll back if there’s an issue.

    This isn’t an Enterprise where you simply can’t manually manage updates across hundreds or thousands of servers, and tens of thousands of workstations - this is a single admin, small environment.

    I do monthly update checks, update where I feel it’s warranted, and verify systems afterwards.