People seem to really like 1Panel.

ART OF THE DEAL, BABY.

Member when he said he’d force them to agree on something within a week or something fucking stupid?

Cloudflare is a DNS provider, DDoS protection provider, tunnel provider, etc. They are not a hosting provider. How is using cloudflare somehow discounting the self-host experience?

It’s the #2 DNS domain registrar in the world right now. It’s not weird at all that most people would use it…luddite you may be.

I started to follow a guide (& doing a bunch of googling + chatGPT) for setting Jellyfin remote access for my parents. And this is where I’m a bit out of my depth […] I have a dynamic IP […] duckDNS path

Stay away from DuckDNS. Used to be fabulous but now it’s incredibly overused and very unstable. Works, then just stops for a period of time. Check out HurricaneElectric. Any A record can be enabled as DDNS that you can update with just curl. It’s great. I’ve been using them for about 10 years now without issues. They were down one time like… 5 years ago for several hours, and that was it.

Also as a side note: I see people talk about Caddy as a reverse proxy for extra security, but what does it do?

This option is nice if you self-host a web server with no bandwidth restriction. You setup caddy, update your DNS to register your home IP on X domain. Point jelly.x.domain to whatever your public IP is, with the port as a reverse proxy, then your IP is reachable via jelly.x.domain but it’s not a great setup for you because of the dynamic IP unless you do a bunch of setup to ensure it routes.

IMO the best option would be;

1. Install jellyfin server
2. Open port 8096 on your router for your jellyfin server IP
3. Create a jellyfin user for your parents, and enable remote connection
4. Setup DDNS (I highly suggest he.net) and point your domain to your IP
5. Setup cron job to update your DDNS record with he.net every hour or so using curl
6. Setup jellyfin for your parents TV or whatever device they’ll use to watch it
7. Login and enjoy

IMO MiniITX are a real PITA to build for on a budget. Most of the smaller components are sold at a premium because of their size.

I sell these things for a living and its exceptionally difficult to compete with pre-built ITX boards. Generally, I have to get a really great deal to come out on top vs some of the prefab models.

Because of that, unless you need something very specific and can’t find it elsewhere, I generally suggest that you do some research and find a nice prefab one for your needs. If you don’t mind spending the extra $, then building them is a hell of a lot of fun because you can customize them and you get exactly what you want, nothing extra.

Replacing the mini-rack with a completely 3D printable version will pretty significantly curtail the cost (between 1-300 euro because mini-racks are fucking expensive), so it might really be worth it if you can. Everything else is pretty trivial. Only thing you’ll have to make sure is you get a CPU and MB with enough PCIe lanes for you to expand to what you want. Specifically a PCIe X4 to 6 port SATA 3 host controller. The board only uses 4x lanes, but you’ll have to ensure that all 4 lanes are available or you’ll see reduced read/write speeds.