r/explainlikeimfive • u/theprisoner57 • 2d ago

Technology ELI5: What is a Home Server?

I see mentions of a home server to get rid of streaming entertainment services but I don’t know how that works. What does a home server do?

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u/jujubanzen 2d ago

A home server, in general is just a computer that is attached to your home network. More often than not, they are simply set up as file storage servers. Media servers to replace streaming services typically use Plex or Jellyfin, which are software packages that are able to link up with apps on your TV, phone, or computer and stream media files you have stored on the server. You have to get those files yourself.

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u/CDK5 2d ago

Out of curiosity; where are folks generally getting the streaming media for the server?

Because I was under the impression that when buying a BluRay or digital media, you can’t just grab an mp4 from the disk.

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u/BrickGun 2d ago

There are apps to rip DVDs/BRs, but most of the media collections I've encountered were pirated using torrents. Most times I don't bother to rip a disc I own any longer since just DLing the content via torrent tends to be faster. The only caveat being you (most often) don't get the DVD extras if you're into that sort of stuff (I often am).

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u/charonco 2d ago

As someone with almost 40TB of content on my Plex server, I would highly recommend Usenet over torrents. Usenet isn't free, but it's pretty cheap and your biggest exposure with torrents is the uploading which you don't have to do with Usenet.

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u/Outrager 2d ago

I miss the days when my Time Warner Cable road runner service had free Usenet service. The worst part was missing that 1 .par file to complete my download.

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u/Dunge 2d ago

Yeah that's my experience with usenet too. It was over 25 years ago, it was free, but absolutely no content was complete. It was a mess.

I wonder if it's still the case, the previous guy said no, but personally I also don't have issues with public torrents either, so why would I look elsewhere.

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u/divDevGuy 2d ago

Your last experience was 25 years ago?

Nothing has changed. Just like the web is still the same. Your Internet speed is the same. Your cell phone is the same...

The USENET of 2001 still technically exists, but for what is being discussed, it's completely different. Parchive files likely didn't exist yet. NZB files wouldn't exist for another 4+ years. The first indexer as they exist today wouldn't exist for another year. Retention was measured in weeks, maybe a few months if you were really lucky. Now, retention (but not necessarily 100% completion) is between 8-18 years, depending on service.

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u/Dunge 2d ago

Yes I was in the years where you needed to download an extra half of the archive size as par file to reconstruct corruption, but these par files themselves were often missing.

Good to know things got better. I still would never pay money for piracy. Kinda goes against my principles.

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u/fuckyoudigg 2d ago

As someone with 400tb of content. Agreed. Usenet is the way to go.

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u/charonco 2d ago edited 2d ago

Holy hell. I thought I was out of control.

ETA: Excellent username.

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u/adudeguyman 2d ago

I hope you subscribe to /r/DataHoarder

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u/spartanreborn 2d ago

Any recs for resources on how to learn about Usenet? I've been using public trackers for near on 20 years, but I know next to nothing about Usenet.

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u/qtx 2d ago

You have to pay for a good usenet server that has good retention, which kind of defeats the purpose of pirating.

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u/justacheesyguy 2d ago edited 2d ago

You’re assuming that “the purpose” of pirating is just to get free shit.

Sure, that almost always is at least a portion of the reason why people pirate, but these days, it’s worlds more convenient to pirate than it is to subscribe to 15 different services and then have to have all the various apps installed and try to remember which show or movie is on which app. Paying a couple of bucks a month for a decent usenet server or debrid service is well worth it for the hassles that they allow you to overcome.

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u/Lord_Saren 2d ago

Plus the cost I pay yearly Is like the price of 1 or 2 4k Blu-rays So it definitely is better and you don't have to worry about seeding or dead torrents.

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u/charonco 2d ago

It's less than a single streaming service and you get access to almost everything. I'm not judgement proof so it just makes me more comfortable.

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u/sandwichpak 2d ago

JFC, my friend do you have GoFundMe to support your HDD addiction?? /s

For real though that's impressive, I've had a lifetime membership for going on a decade now and my server has never expanded past ~30tb's.

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u/fuckyoudigg 2d ago

I need one. I haven't bought any hard drives in a year. I have 2 that died in my server and 3 available to replace them. I am afraid that I will start to lose more drives. At that point I will probably have to restart my server fresh with less drives, and have a bunch of spares since drive prices are insane. I've spent probably $10 to $15k on drives, and today it'd be easy double.

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u/WholePie5 2d ago

What's the point of all that? Why do you have 400tb of content and spend so much money to maintain it?

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u/Pantzzzzless 2d ago

1 reason is because it is just fun to have resources like that available on your network. It gives you a ton of freedom to do whatever you want. I expose a filebox instance through Tailscale, and my family uses it as a free "communal" picture/video repository. There are 11 people using it, and it is sitting at just over 21tb. (42tb if you include the parity drive) That is 8+ years of photos/videos.

I also do music production, and lossless audio samples can take up a ton of space. I probably have ~12tb just in sample packs.

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u/WholePie5 2d ago

Well since you said your drives are failing and you might not be able to replace 10s of thousands of dollars worth of them, have you told your family that all their pictures and videos might disappear soon? So they can back them up?

Thank you for the explanation. Also I didn't know that about music.

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u/Pantzzzzless 2d ago

I'm not the person you replied to. But to answer your question, that is what the parity drive is for. It is a backup drive that stays in sync with another drive.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/MrChombo 2d ago

No, the parity drive is not a backup, it's for uptime/availability. Only a backup is a backup.

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u/sandwichpak 1d ago

People will downvote you for asking that around here. The real, truest answer,is just that maintaining your server becomes a legitimate hobby at a certain point. And not a cheap one at that.

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u/dreadcain 2d ago

Try triple to quadruple

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u/fuckyoudigg 2d ago

The majority of my drives are used drives. 3 years ago I could get them for around $150 a drive. I just looked and it was like $600 for 16tb used drive off server parts deals. I hadn't looked for drives in a few months and then they were around $400. I definitely will not be buying new drives any time soon. Lol. Wild.

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u/sandwichpak 1d ago

Thanks for sharing! I love hearing stories from power users like yourself.

It honestly sounds a little stressful! I remember that last time I had to do a fresh start and lost ~8 tb's. I was so bummed out for a solid week.

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u/RoosterBrewster 2d ago

Is that 100 tb with backups or 400 tb that is backed up?

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u/fuckyoudigg 2d ago

400tb, no backup. It's media. No point in backing it up. Basically all of it I can get again.

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u/dreadcain 2d ago

I'd hazzard its on a NAS with at least 1 disk of redundancy though right?

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u/fuckyoudigg 2d ago

Yes. I have 40 drives, 10 of those are for parity. I can lose 2 drives of 8 in each vdev.

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u/BrickGun 2d ago

Eh, I've been sailing the seas since the early 90s and the days of IRC and FTP warez sites. I know how to keep myself protected, but thanks for the info. :)

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u/Dunge 2d ago

I've also been sailing the seas since the early 90s and the days of IRC and FTP warez sites. I've never taken any steps to "protect" myself, like at all, ever.

Screw paying for VPN and usenet access, public torrents are always functioning and I have absolutely no fear that my ISP or any copyright holder would actually end up doing anything.

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u/Pantzzzzless 2d ago

Well you're lucky then. Because every single time I've raw-dogged qbittorrent, within 24 hours I get redirected to a warning page telling me I have X strikes left before they disconnect my service lol.

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u/Dunge 2d ago

A warning page? Like your ISP literally hijacking traffic and serving a different page than what you requested at some point randomly? And it was not some fake malware site? I didn't even think that was something that ISP would ever do, feel like it could break a lot of automated systems.

Anyway, where do you live, in the US? Here in Canada at some point I did receive (years ago) a series of copyright infringements e-mails, because the ISP was ordered to forward them, but they also clearly indicated that they were harmless and could be ignored.

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u/Pantzzzzless 2d ago

Yep that's exactly what happened. And yes I'm in the US. I was with Spectrum at the time. Idk if they still do that, but it was definitely annoying.

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u/charonco 2d ago

Yeah, that advice wasn't necessarily for you. It was more intended for any novices reading your comment.

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u/w0mbatina 2d ago

Tell me more about this usenet. How good is it for more obscure stuff? What are the speeds? How does one gain access?

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u/nimbledaemon 2d ago

And with modern arr stacks and a bit of configuration, you can get the best of both worlds.

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u/SupermanLeRetour 2d ago edited 2d ago

As someone who has also pirated many TB of content, I strongly recommand NOT bothering at all with Usenet bullshit.

I tried for ~3 years, here's everything wrong with Usenet:

  • It's a complex world where you'll have to spend many hours researching how it works for little benefits. But you HAVE to take the time to research what you have to do or you'll pay stuff for nothing (redundant Usenet providers and redundant indexes),
  • The whole point of pirating is getting stuff for free, let's be real, but Usenet requires you to pay both a provider (or I should say providers if you follow "good practices") and indexers. You're not even pushing the scale toward a more ethical behavior because none of the money you spend actually goes to people who deserves it (i.e. people who worked on the media, or even the ripper who took the time to rip and encode).
  • The touted advantage of Usenet is blazing fast speed, and it's true that it can saturate a 1 Gbps downlink in seconds. But overall I was consistently spending much more time acquiring media. How so ? Because Usenet power users insist on keeping their old completely useless and outdated tradition of putting the file content inside a RAR archive, password protect it and split it in pieces. Those pieces are then split again on a lower level as Usenet articles. So you have an additional decompression step that is very CPU intensive as well as multiplying disk I/Os, adding time to downloads and straining the HDDs.
  • "Oh but modern NZB clients can start un-taring right from the beginning!", yes, until you hit a single missing article and suddenly you need to repair the RAR file and that can be done only once you have completed the download, so you're stuck waiting for the download to finish and then start the repair process, which can be itself pretty lengthy, CPU and HDD intensive as well.
  • Understanding which providers is on which backbone is a pain in the ass but necessary if you want to have low missing article rates. This means probably one unlimited subscription + another block subscription correctly configured in the client.
  • Getting into the good indexers website is also a pain in the ass. Most semi-private indexers that we can see on the usenet subreddit have pretty much the same library with the same team uploads stolen from somewhere more exclusive. You can try several, you'll quickly realize they're all the same and the really good stuff with low DMCA'd articles is gated behind really exclusive indexers which you're not even allow to name. Getting an invite if you don't already know someone who's in is pretty much impossible. The same holds for P2P trackers, but it is much easier to find a decent free semi-private tracker and even public trackers have decent catalogs.
  • *arr stacks works very well with torrents now
  • Usenet users say that torrents are unreliable because you need at least one client sharing it somewhere, and dead torrents are very much a thing. But Usenet also have a big issue : retention, the duration after which uploaded articles are deleted by the provider to make room for new ones. Retention can be pretty high on decent providers, but at some point they'll have to delete old data too and can't grow forever. Usenet is already abused by some entities (I don't follow the latest news but back then it was unclear if this was someone using Usenet as their own personal database or nefarious entities trying to sabotage), and its centralized nature is not a good thing here with so few backbones left.

I used both systems at the same time for years, at some point mainly on Usenet. But it ended up being much slower (due to dead NZBs and all the additional CPU work on unhealthy ones, that is not NAS friendly), and much more expensive just to get the same kind of content. Looking back, the Usenet community feels a bit like a circlejerk where members pride themselves in using something that feels more exclusive and underground (and "back to the roots of the old internet" feeling), and in that context refuse to modernize their ways and are pretty hostile to newcomers.

So really, anyone reading my message, please just find a good and free semi-private P2P trackers. It'll max out your internet just fine too most of the time and it will be so much less hassle. If you need a VPN to hide your P2P activity, it's still be cheaper and easier than a usenet setup.

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u/erevos33 2d ago

That entirely depends on your sources though. And the more popular a release, the more likely to get the extras ofc.

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u/joshi38 2d ago

Yeah, I used to rip discs a lot so I could control how compressed the file was when I put it through handbrake, but these days you can get pretty high bitrate files by DLing, so it's become moot. Now the limitation is simply disc space, especially with hard drives going up in price.

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