Thanks! I feel pretty good about the power draw based on what you wrote, even though HDDs are going to add to that, and that’s good to hear about the mini PC running Jellyfin, which gives me some hope for the on-board server in a NAS like the one I’m eyeing. And even if that doesn’t work out, I’ve got my own mini PC that I should be able to leave in place most of the time.

I’m not a total networking noob, but I definitely have some homework to do based on this write-up. Thanks.

You’re a stranger on the internet. Even if I was so petty as to blame you, I’d have a hard time tracking you down, haha.

So then if I’m evaluating a worst case for what I plan to use this NAS for, it would be that an attacker gains access to movies that I have on my shelf, CDs that I have on my shelf, books that I’d have the right to redownload as long as the place I bought them from is still in business, and my own save files for DRM-free video games that Heroic Games Launcher currently tells me not to rely on them for syncing back to GOG.com. At which point, if some attacker found a vulnerability and locked my NAS from me, they’d have caused me an annoyance in that I’d have to reformat those drives and re-rip that media. With no sensitive information intended to be on this thing, it seems pretty low risk, right?

Oh, sorry, haha. There’s a lot of jargon thrown around in a place like this, and I thought this was one I missed.

Sorry, but the SEO on “Q2” is pretty bad. What are you referring to? And what are the actual risks of a port being exposed to the outside world via an off-the-shelf router? Surely they can always hit my IP, and if this port is only exposed for Jellyfin, it would be just as vulnerable as any other port that calls out, right? I ask that knowing that it must be wrong, but I don’t understand how.

If they’re self-hostable, they cease to be live services. And I’m just fine with that. I have no problem completely ignoring live services as a customer, but the problem I do have is how much research it takes to find out if a game I’m interested in is built to last or otherwise respects my values. Every Borderlands game has LAN multiplayer except for the GOTY edition of the first game, and even then, you can still acquire the regular edition of that game that still has it. Meanwhile, Hitman, a single player game, locks a lot of its best stuff behind an arbitrary server connection; the community has made pirate server executables to replace it, but it doesn’t mean that I want to reward IO Interactive with my dollars for that design decision.

why would anyone want to buy in to something that would likely only last a few years?

I ask people this every time they put time and money into a new live service game. I was referred to this community when I went down a self-hosted VPN rabbit hole for old LAN games whose multiplayer will never die.

He can hope a lot of things, but Stadia sure didn’t take.