Category: Uncategorized

Plex desktop and HTPC client

slaanesh 3 Comments

Plex Desktop and HTPC clients are available again. Now Plex ships a precompiled QT 6 libraries with the private API enabled that allows for an easy packaging. The packages are available for EL9+ and Fedora on the x86_64 architecture only.

Just install the one you need via DNF. For the desktop application:

# dnf -y install PlexDesktop

For the HTPC application:

# dnf -y install plexHTPC

The packages come with every possible system library in use and can be installed in parallel. They both suggest all the VA-API drivers available in the multimedia repository.

Keep in mind that both sport MPV as the main player, so you can still customize the player options as you see fit. For example to force NVIDIA’s hardware decoding in both applications:

$ cat .local/share/plex/mpv.conf
hwdec=nvdec

The HTPC optional package that creates an auto starting “HTPC session” for set top box media players is not restored yet, I will add it in the next days.

The packages bundle QT 6 (for the web interface engine) with the private API enabled, FFMPeg with a progress API status reporting, a custom MPV and a CEC library in the HTPC client.

Why not using the official Flatpak installation directly? First of all I don’t like all the mounting and folder redirection of Flatpak, but also:

# flatpak install tv.plex.PlexDesktop tv.plex.PlexHTPC
Looking for matches…
Required runtime for tv.plex.PlexHTPC/x86_64/stable (runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/23.08) found in remote flathub
Do you want to install it? [Y/n]: y

tv.plex.PlexHTPC permissions:
    ipc      network      pulseaudio      x11     devices     dbus access [1]

    [1] org.freedesktop.PowerManagement, org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver

tv.plex.PlexDesktop permissions:
    ipc      network      pulseaudio      x11     devices     dbus access [1]

    [1] org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver


        ID                                                 Branch            Op       Remote        Download
 1.     org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                23.08             i        flathub       < 172.2 MB
 2.     org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                23.08-extra       i        flathub       < 172.2 MB
 3.     org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-555-58-02       1.4               i        flathub       < 305.0 MB
 4.     org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale                    23.08             i        flathub       < 360.2 MB (partial)
 5.     org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264                  2.2.0             i        flathub       < 944.3 kB
 6.     org.freedesktop.Platform                           23.08             i        flathub       < 227.5 MB
 7.     tv.plex.PlexHTPC                                   stable            i        flathub       < 150.9 MB
 8.     tv.plex.PlexDesktop                                stable            i        flathub       < 149.2 MB

Proceed with these changes to the system installation? [Y/n]:

That’s a whopping 1.5 GiB compressed download compared to the package footprint:

$ ls -1hs Plex*
106M PlexDesktop-1.96.0.177-3.fc40.x86_64.rpm
105M PlexHTPC-1.64.0.170-2.fc40.x86_64.rpm

That’s more than 7 times the size. Flatpak applications with duplicate libraries everywhere are not really my taste.

Server replaced

slaanesh 2 Comments

Due to some failure, the old server went offline and needed to be recovered. Easy fix, but required console access for repairing.

Unfortunately, the NOT awesome support of the housing provider locked me out of the management console for 4 days straight before they fixed some issues and granted me access again.

According to them, I should have just waited for days without doing anything. Since this is not an option, I reinstalled the server with all the repositories (rsync and https) and switched the DNS record to it.

Today I finally regained access to the old server and picked up one file that I needed to restore the database, so here is up again. On the positive side:

  • It’s a much more capable hardware with SSD drives
  • Updated OS
  • Updated hardening policies (CIS, NIST, and some other stuff)
  • Configuration/setup is fully automated
  • I have full access on the console in case of issues
  • It’s available on IPv6
  • Proper crypto policies (it’s now listed as A on the Qualys website):

Bigger dedicated server

slaanesh 11 Comments

As you might have noticed, in the last few weeks there were issues with the website and repositories.

This was due to the fact that after all the load moved to the dedicated server, the sizing of it was not enough to cope with load. CPU usage constantly at limit and not enough memory that resulted in OOM killing (most of the time) the database.

I’m just finished replacing the server with a bigger one (4 times the size), hope this would be enough for the moment. If not, I will separate the repository download from the main website.

Hope that this will be stable for a while.

Back online! Thank you!

slaanesh 9 Comments

So, the website is back online, with some changes! There might be some issues still on some random link or database references to the old hosting directory structure but I will fix them as soon as I spot them.

Hope you will receive an email from this 🙂

This is what happened on GoDaddy:

The hosting was a “shared hosting”, basically a WordPress instance and a shared folder to host some content (the packages). This is how it was born and how it stayed for quite some years. At the time it was “ok” but it went downhill over the years.

Unfortunately for GoDaddy users, being a shared hosting, you have no choice but click on some web page to get what you need. One of these needs is an SSL certificate.

Yesterday my credit card was billed more than 200 USD for an SSL certificate signed by GoDaddy. Since they sell certificates and control the platform, switching to Let’s Encrypt is not possible.

After the billing, I could see the new certificate, but the certificate was not pushed to the instance. After almost a day on the chat with random people that just told me to wait an hour without getting anything fixed, I was put into phone contact with the “shared hosting” services.

There I was told that they were aware of the problem, and that all customers on the same shared hosting (“legacy”, according to what they said) were impacted since the 30th of April (seriously??) and there was no fix yet.

You are forced to pay a stupid SSL certificate a lot, you get an issue, the certificate can’t be used, they don’t fix it and good bye. Their service is beyond ridiculous.

After some more chatting with support it seems that at least I can be refunded for the last renewal of the certificate, let’s see if this happens.

After this bit of history, back on the new hosting.

Dedicated hosting

The site is no longer hosted on GoDaddy, so now this time I picked up a dedicated sysmte where I have direct access to it and I can do much more than before. This has led me to being able to use Let’s Encrypt certificates and certbot for automated renewals, thus saving money as well.

Bandwidth is much more stable, so download times should be greatly improved, especially for me for uploading the packages. I was able to sync the ~100 GB of packages in just a few minutes.

Mirroring repositories

Having access to the system means that now there is also an RSYNC daemon running serving all the content of the /repos folder. You can sync a specific repository with a command like this:

rsync -crlpvz --progress --delete-after rsync://negativo17.org:/repos/nvidia local/path

I’ve also added the instructions on the /repos folder directly.

A big thank you

Thank you very much with all my heart for the round of donations received! This means a lot to me.

All the donations received on Paypal and the cheaper / more versatile hosting should be enough to keep this site alive for another couple of years!

What’s next?

I’m planning to add some more content (ARM packages) and maybe migrate to something else that is not WordPress. I was thinking about a wiki, probably MediaWiki to make it similar to the Arch wiki, which I found very clear and easy to read, if you have any preferences please let me know.

Certificate expired…

slaanesh Leave a comment

After spending a day on the phone with GoDaddy, they informed me that they have an issue with the shared hosting and they can not update certificates on the various instances. According to them they had this issue on the past 3 weeks!

Of course nobody bothered to tell me and now the certificate is expired and I have no way of fixing it. I’m now in the process of moving everything to a separate hosting provider, starting from the repositories.

Of course now it will be a dedicated box, so the cost will not be the same. Any donation is of course accepted.

WordPress hack fixed

slaanesh 19 Comments

Some automated bot added an extra PHP file and a redirect, so when Googling for this website you would have been redirected to a page selling drugs.

I’m still trying to think why looking for some Fedora package would trigger a compulsive Viagra purchase, but hey, not everyone is the same.

Page & redirects have been removed, everything is back to normal. The specific repository pages were not visible (404) due to a faulty WordPress plugin update, which I removed. A crawl from Google has been triggered to remove the drugs page from Google search.

I will move the GPG public key of the repositories somewhere else, so people can still check if they have any doubt.

Now, If I could figure out how to remove that Jetpack error about AMP….

Also, looking for a cheap hosting solution (hey, this has been running for free since 2013), ideally where I also manage the website (no more WordPress..) and not the hosting company managing it for me, so if you have any suggestion let me know.