Linux After Dark – Episode 130

0:00Thanks for choosing to listen to this late night Linux family podcast. We're only able to do this because of the people who support us. None of our show is a pay world, but our Patreon supporters can get most episodes early and never hear any ads. Learn more at latenightlinux.com slash support, or support us by telling a friend or colleague about everything we do. Hello and welcome to episode 130 of LITX After Dark. I'm Joe. I'm Chris. I'm Gary. And I'm me. Welcome back all. Chris, you want advice for something? Yeah, so we're coming into the summer. It's time to travel again. I've mentioned many times before what I tend to do is sync media onto local devices using fin droid on Android to tablet some phones. And that's okay, but I'm wondering if I can economize and put all the media content onto a centralized device that runs a jellyfish and server via a router. So everyone connects to a central library, but I carry it with me.

1:04Am I being over converged, should we say? Why do you need to carry the device with you? I guess this is my initial question. If you've got the travel router, you've got a VPN back to your house. Why don't you just use that? Because if you're on a fast moving train, once you get out of this fine country we live in with its slow railway links, you travel incredibly fast. So if you use the train Wi-Fi or even Rome onto data, the connection is not actually that reliable. And having to sync amongst two, three devices is a bit annoying to think about in advance and often gets forgotten in holiday plans. So having a larger library to select from, it's like the days of the iPod when that first came along. Where instead of selecting your favorite CDs for your discmen into a wallet, you had all of your music with you all the time. Does that make sense? So let me get this train. This is just for the time where you're on the train.

2:06Not quite. So people have mentioned this before. Aren't you going on holiday? Why do you want to watch television? But if you have small children on holiday, they go to bed early, but you also can't go out unless you have someone to look after them. So you do end up sometimes wanting to watch films and things. And we have been in places that promised Wi-Fi and it was poor or there's no mobile signal. So yeah, it is a bit of a niche use case that everyone wouldn't want. But having a centralized library you carry, seems attractive. Now the difficulty is, if you look at the jellyfin ducks, they say most single-ball computers are too slow to provide an acceptable jellyfin experience. And then they link a bunch of stuff like a Ys 570 and onwards. But that's carrying that and a power supply. Even I'm not doing that. Come on. Right. Because I was going to say Pi5, NVMe drive that's big enough for the media, a power bank

3:11that is capable of powering the Pi5 and the router job done. But you're telling me a Pi5 isn't beefy enough? Well, jellyfin are telling me I've not tried it. So if anyone's listening and they do do it, I'd be interested to hear from them. Because if it's direct play, you would think it would be okay. But then when I start thinking about that, maybe I'm over complicating it. Maybe a more traditional file sharing server that you just stream from like VLC or Samba, NFS might be easier. Yeah. So I did something like this on my most recent trip where I was on a flight for 10 plus hours. And I just had an NVMe drive with a layer of music on it and a layer of films on it. And when I wanted to watch something from it, I plugged it into my iPad and opened the files in VLC and that worked quite well. So that works for you. But this is the multi-user aspect which starts to become trickier.

4:12So I have recently upped my travel route again. So the route I have is as powerful as my home route and the OpenWRT1 and has a USB 3 port and enough RAM to maybe serve from it with one of those thumb drives. But again, I feel like maybe I'm pushing it too much. I mean, it's just a Samba shared that you're pulling off 20 megabits a second maximum for anything that you'd seen call to it, right? So that seems like it would be doable. I mean, I've run file servers that I'm streaming media off of on much less before, particularly if it's just streaming the files with Samba. Because I have a little Samsung Fit USB drive that I used to have in a Raspberry Pi 3. I could try that because the right speed on those drives isn't fun, but the read speed is OK. So that could be an option and it does mean, you know, I like OpenWRT and the latest releases dropped OPKG for APK. So it basically is that Alpine package manager, which is faster and opens up lots of packages.

5:17I could probably put that together fairly easily and have a reasonable amount of space for media on a thumb drive. And then I don't have to worry about the overhead of a jelly fence over. Well, yeah. And then you've probably got your laptop, all your phone with you that you can run VLC on and plug that into the TV and job done in a Pint, right? Yeah, and I have the Firestick as well with Cody on it, which is also very portable. So you can then plug that into a television if there's one there. So I bought a bespoke traveling hard case because it was on special offer that you can custom compartmentalize. So it has the travel route to the Firestick and all associated adapters and cables in like a zip up hard case that you can just put in your back back and go. I still reckon that a Pi 5 would be beefy enough to do it if you're doing mostly direct play. Well, the flip side of this is you're taking your laptop with you anyway, right? And even your Dell travel laptop, Chris, is the same CPU or certainly the same age of

6:18CPU as a Ys 5070. And that can do some reasonable transcodes even if you're not doing directly. So is an option to use your laptop as the jelly fence server once you arrive? Once you arrive, yes, but on a train table with a four year old, it's slightly less secure. Yeah, but you could have the laptop on and closed and running the server, couldn't you? That's true. And in the backpack, and in fact, my backpack has a USB port in it, which is quite an interesting little detail. That's possibly an option, especially if you set the lid to not suspend or do anything when you close it, you could keep it out of the way and have that. So I didn't think of that Gary actually. It's true. You're already carrying a computer. Why do you want to carry another computer? Yeah, I mean, that's something that I explored recently when I was traveling was running whatever local media server I needed on the laptop and then using my phone as a client to then Chromecast it back to a Chromecast, which did work.

7:18I was running Chrome OS Flex. So I was running jellyfin inside the Linux VM on an eighth gen i5. So performance wasn't great, but again, it was a very limited subset of media. Well, that's the other thing. You want to be taking absolutely no more than 1080p and maybe even get some 720p versions of stuff that's going to be good enough for traveling. The advantages that I never have anything above 1080p because I don't own any screen in my life above 1080p. All right. Well, there you go then. All the DVDs that you've ripped and blue rays you've ripped are all at 1080. Yeah, and even if I get a 4K TV, I'm obviously not going to rip them again, Joe. So that's the difficulty. I mean, I'd love to see you try and rip your 576p DVDs at 4K. You could upscale though. They look great. AI upscaling of Chris's DVD collection. What could get around? Don't forget to do frame interpolation while you're at it. Do it with some old X-Fits maybe. Yeah, I need the codec pack, Joe. So I've got a pay for that and everything else.

8:20Yeah, and then you have Divex pop up in the corner at the beginning. You know how normal people would solve this problem? How? So you've got your media collection that you've either rented or purchased through iTunes. And then you have your family plan on all of your devices and everyone downloads what they need before they go. Or you have your files and you air drop them between all of your devices. I think what you've done there, mate, is you've confused normal people with rich people. You've actually just rebranded the same model I started with because I can pull the files onto the devices before I go or while I have good internet. Findroid lets you do that. The official jellyfish, Andrew Klein, is bad at that, but Findroid has an offline mode. So you can pull stuff down and it's there and it pulls them metadata and everything. So when you put it in offline mode, it looks exactly the same as if you had an internet connection, but the library drops to whatever is actually locally available. But then your kid says, oh, I want to watch this other random show.

9:23Exactly. That they're bored of, you thought, but I'll hang on now. They're back into it for some reason. Exactly. Even Joe who is childless has understood the mind of a four-year-old there. Ah, that's because I'm closer to a four-year-old than a four-year-old. Terrifying. I mean, I've had this before on long car journeys and I've ended up having to flip the hotspot on, tell it to transcode to 480p and then they're going to slurry and yes, it's not a fun experience. Yeah, whereas if you just got your whole library with you, that's not going to be a problem. Yeah. And I do actually have quite a lot of free space on the SSD of what I call my beta laptop and what failim calls his off-site machine. Yeah. Spec for spec. But it's just about putting the work in a little bit and syncing it to that and making sure, to be honest, I'd probably just use the jellyfin container to be able to spin it up and down fairly easily when I needed it. Yeah, I mean, that's what I did and it was just me on a flight.

10:23So actually, I'd watched the files off of the SSD on an iPad. But once I got to the hotel, that was a really nice solution to be able to have a at-home like experience because my laptop's going to be plugged on, charging and connected to the Wi-Fi anyway. Because I think an N6000, as you said, Gary, has similar, if not better, integrated Wi-GPU compared to the J4105N, 5,000 and 5,000, whatever it is, J5,000 and 5N in the Wi-5070. So you should get quick syncing and all of that stuff, even though I consider it to be a shit laptop. It's a shit laptop, but it would probably make quite a good headless box for this kind of thing, right? I mean, the Wi-5070 up until just a few weeks ago was my main plaque server and handled all of the trans codes I needed fine. And then it really fell downhill if I had something that was HEVC with HDR. I think you've actually given me two different solutions that all I have to do is plug a tiny

11:24thumbnail drive into the router and set up the existing laptop I would take anyway to solve the problem much more elegantly than a spider bag of cables and hard drives and Raspberry Pi. Yeah, you're right. You've got the option to just access the files over SMB on the clients or have the jellyfin server access them over SMB and serve them out, right? Yeah. I would belt and braces it personally. I'd kind of set both up and prefer the jellyfin setup because then it remembers what episodes they've watched and all rest a bit. But if that falls down, then at least you've got that backup, Samber or whatever, an FS solution straight off the router. Yeah, and this is much nicer because let me tell you transferring the media to UFS or EMMC storage on ancient Android phones is incredibly slow compared to a quick arsink down onto an MVME local laptop drive. So all of this is, you know, when you need reflector to bounce ideas off because you can't

12:31see the wood for the trees. All of this is much more sensible than any of the other things I might have thought of doing. Have you got a decent power bank though to power the laptop? I don't and I don't think I have enough time to buy one, but I have seen them fall in price because really you want 65 watts of output, maybe 45 is okay and a reasonable amount of juice in the tank to get you through. But having said that, the advantage of most good trains is that you can plug things in while you're there. While you're in accommodation, again, I'm not camping nomad style. So there is always going to be power nearby, I think. All right. See, I'm used to the trains in the north of England where you have to close the doors manually. Gary told me what they were called once. Paces. That's it. Yeah, yeah. That just buses with train wheels on. Essentially, yeah. And they do not have socket outlets in them. I mean, to give you an answer, Joe, of how in the civilized world, this is no longer a problem. I took the same in you power bank as you have, which is a 25,000,000,000 watt output.

13:39And I took it on my week-long trip abroad with me last week. And I charged it up before I left and it's come back and it's still on 100%. Wow. I just didn't even take it out the back. It was quite literally an anchor weighing me down for the entire time I was away. Now, a anchor or something that made you feel confident to go out and about. That's how I feel about having it. It would have been nice to know that had my L380 run out and I was nowhere near power that I could have plugged it in. Yeah. But it did make the bag significantly heavier than it ought to have been. Yeah. So yeah, I think that broadly solves my issue. And I've managed to pair down my travel pack, as I said, to this compartmentalised box. I have this coup d'-t-r-3000 router, size of a pack of cards, which is as powerful as the OpenWRT1, Wi-Fi 6, a fire stick. And that basically all fits in with an 11.6-inch laptop.

14:40So I'm quite happy now. My bag is a lot lighter than it used to be. But what about you? Because I think Gary you said you were given rather generously, basically the same router by a different manufacturer as your travel device. Yeah. So I was given a barrel AX in a little carrier bag, along with a bunch of 10 gig SFP modules by a coworker, which was really useful. And I took that with me, along with also the Unify UTR. And I had two different purposes for these. So the one that we have, Chris, the barrel or barrel alternative is really good in a hotel room. We tell that I was in, I was still able to get the Wi-Fi down the other end of the corridor by the lift, which was quite amazing how to get down and turn the transmit power down. But the real hero of the trip, actually, was the Unify travel router, because you say yours is the size of a deck of cards. The Unify one really is the size of a deck of cards. And it is tiny.

15:40I mean, it's about the size of a credit card and maybe a little bit thicker. I think of like a rich wallet. It's that kind of thickness. It's just powered by USB-C and does all of the things that you would expect to travel router to do. I connect to an AP, re-broadcast, and spins up a VPN. Now I was on an 11 hour flight where the Wi-Fi was $25 for the entire flight. And there were two of us and we clearly didn't want to pay $25 per device each. So the UTR came in really handy. I plugged it into the USB power on the entertainment display on the plane, left it in the seat back pocket for the entire flight and it just kind of worked. So what you paid once and then just re-broadcast it essentially to all your devices? Yeah. So our one connected device was the cloned MAC address of my phone, of the travel router. And then we just connected all of our devices to that. So we both had a phone, a tablet, and a laptop each. And it was in flight Wi-Fi.

16:41So it wasn't amazing in terms of speeds and the carry row is with hasn't upgraded to satellite yet. So it was usable for sending messages backwards and forwards and trolling our colleague who had flown with a worse airline. That's the great killer feature of having that because you can overcome the device limit and the MAC cloning feature is always built in. Like obviously you can do it open WRT, but the stock firmware, especially on the GLINE net, which I think is your one, the brand, is very well done. So it makes it very easy. And you can get to open WRT underneath if you want to, but it's also got a very clean interface on top of it. Yeah. I mean, the only trouble I had was entirely self-inflicted once I arrived at the destination because I could not get the VPN to connect, could not work out for the life of me why. And then I discovered that the country I was in, I had blocked that country's IP ranges on my home firewall. So I had to backdoor my way in in order to unblock the IP ranges so that the VPN would connect.

17:43And then once the VPN connected, it was solid for the entire week that I was there. Is that pure wire guard then or is that tailscore? So I have got a bit of a hybrid approach now, depending on the device that's connecting. So all of the clients are running tailscale. The site to site stuff from the travel router and from my offsite box in OVH is still wire guard. But the Unified One I've just been using Teleport, which is Unified's proprietary wire guard implementation. And that's really nice because I open the Unify app on my phone, I connect and then it handles all of the authentication and key exchange and everything for me. So there's no kind of wire guard keys to exchange and move around. Yeah. The Unified Gears sounds like it's sort of like the apple of networking and it like it just all works together, but you're properly locked in. You have to use all of their shit basically to make it work. Well, it was founded by X members of the airport team. So exactly why it seems quite apple like to you. Right. But you're not entirely locked in, right?

18:44I mean, the Unified Gateway I have at home does wire guard, it does open VPN. So that's how I get away with having the GLiNet when I travel because it spits out a wire guard config. I throw that on the GLiNet and it just connects. Right. So the site to site connections, are you sticking with pure wire guard by choice or just because you haven't migrated? What's the story there? So I've got three sites that are all running Unify stuff and they're using Unify's, they call it site fabric, but they just handle the key exchange for you effectively. The places where I am still using wire guard are the things that aren't Unify gateways. So the box that I've got in over age sits behind a PF sense, for example. So that just wire guards back and the travel breeder clearly isn't going to use Unify's proprietary thing and the closest Unify came to making a travel breeder still didn't have wireless uplinks for anything but the UTR. So that wasn't particularly useful either. So I start with the GLiNet for that and it just spends up a wire guard tunnel.

19:44So there are really two wire guard configs on the box at home. And may when you travel, you just do it like a normal person and don't bother with any of this. Not really. I'm using my music on my phone and I'll listen to that. I don't know. Sometimes I'll read something read something. Oh, here we go. The cow newborns come back after all this time. Yeah, you get you collaily out there. That's it. The folding ukulele. I know it's in the backpack. I would love to sit next to May on a flight playing the ukulele for 11 hours. Sounds incredible. We just because really we know that May is winning and we aren't because we're so addicted to technology, there we come, bear to be without even for what supposedly a holiday where we're supposed to touch grass and forget about all this stuff, right? I mean, half of my bag was travel routeus, crick-a-stitch, burner laptop. And do you know what? I was working. So I was on the office Wi-Fi for most of the time. And then I was out for dinner and drinks with colleagues.

20:46And then I got back to the hotel at about 10pm in a time zone that was way off of where I actually live. So I just wanted to collapse into bed. So all I did was play YouTube on the TV, which felt like quite a lot of infrastructure to take to basically be able to fall asleep to YouTube. I get upset when I have my 16-inch MacBook in the bag for work. I'm like, God, this thing's massive. How are you using your entire backpack for this? Well, it wasn't my entire backpack, May. I had a spare pair of pants in there and I had a toothbrush and a hoodie. And there was space for actual practical things. I think two additional considerations as well, which I think I've said before, is a security because basically you double that and it means you have your own subnet. You can control and it's running software and firmware and operating systems that you trust. And also it means, frequently now, I arrive at holiday accommodation or a hotel and because

21:48of regulation, they can't just have admin admin or a very poor Wi-Fi password. They will now hard code a certain amount of entropy into a unique password that never gets changed by the people that run the accommodation. And they'll say, oh, when you need the Wi-Fi, it's just on the underside of the router there. And it's literally like 63 random characters. You mean like an Amazon brand? Yeah. And I just put that in once as the uplink or hard wire if there's an ethernet port available on the router that's there. And then it's programmed with the same Wi-Fi that we have at home. And I just say, right, it's ready now. Everyone turns on their Wi-Fi and there's none of that. What's the password struggle? I think you've got two very different use cases. You've got Gary traveling for work and like you say, just collapsing into bed at the end of the day. Whereas Chris, you've got a family to entertain. You've got little kids that demand there, whatever it is, fireman, Sam or whatever.

22:49It's a very different situation that you find yourself in. And I think it makes more sense for you to be messing around with this stuff than it does for you, Gary. Well, my use case is subtly different again, right? Chris is describing the Airbnb scenario where they've just got their BT router or whatever in the corner. Mine is Hotel Wi-Fi, which is often misconfigured and is somewhat hostile and is open to everyone with no author on it. So I almost feel justified just having something in front of that that isn't my phone or isn't my laptop because I've connected my laptop to Hotel Wi-Fi before. I opened up the network in the file explorer and just seen everything. Every device connected. Yeah, no client device isolation, no firewalling, nothing's VLANed off. And for that reason alone, I feel like I should take something to give me a VPN back to my house. Yeah, but you can do that on device. Sure, but then my device is still exposed to the crummy network and I've got to then

23:52mess with IP tables and things to stop inbound connections, which then messes with a bunch of other stuff. It also means I can't use my Chromecast in the evening, right? Because you never know what you're going to end up doing. There's also the flexibility. Sometimes my extended family have their family is spread all over the world and not always in the most positive circumstances. So being able to communicate is good. Being able to do stuff like, tear the my phone to that router so that when they're stressed and want to speak to a family member, they still use what they consider to be the same Wi-Fi as home, not knowing that the uplink is actually an e-sim on my phone, tethering to the USB port and the router to give them one. Those kinds of things are kind of helpful and it's just the kind of personality I am that I make those things happen without too much fuss because it just reduces the stress levels of everyone. Well, yeah, being able to have the same SSID and password and them just not, you know, most people don't really have a concept of networking today.

24:55They're just like, is the Wi-Fi working? The Wi-Fi symbols on, I've got internet good. And for you to be able to do that is pretty nice. It is, although it does confuse people sometimes. And I remember being on holiday with my in-laws in the Canary Islands and they were in the next room to us and were very confused and they were like, how am I connected to your Wi-Fi that's back in the UK? How has that happened? Does the hotel have the same Wi-Fi as you? And we've got travel Rita. It's the same username and password. And just even the fact that setting the same username and password or the same SSID and password is a thing is like magic to most people. Well, all of this travel Rita stuff makes me want to buy one and then actually leave the house. But I never do that. So I probably won't. Does the park not have Wi-Fi? No, I just have my excellent LTA on my phone. With that we better get out of here then. We'll be back in a couple of weeks but until then I've been Joe.

25:55I've been Chris. I've been Gary. Yeah and I've been me. See you later.