Gerowen

I dropped it in favor of Jellyfin some time back, but this was a good excuse to go ahead and delete my family’s accounts.

It is the command line interface for libvirt/qemu/kvm on Linux. I usually just use virt-manager remotely via SSH to create and manage my VMs, but virsh can be handy as well.

Generate a unique key for each client or device. SSH keys identify devices, not people, so I do not recommend sharing the same key between two different devices.

I generally do a few things to protect SSH:

1. Disable password login and use keys only
2. Install and configure Fail2Ban
3. Disable root login via ssh altogether. Just change “permit root login” from “no password” to just “no”. You can still become root via sudo or su after you’re connected, but that would trigger an additional password request. I always connect as a normal user and then use sudo if/when I need it. I don’t include NOPASSWD in my sudoers to make certain sudo prompts for a password. Doesn’t do any good to force normal user login if sudo doesn’t require a password.
4. If connecting via the same network or IPs, restrict the SSH open port to only the IPs you trust.
5. I don’t have SSH internet visible. I have my own Wireguard server running on a separate raspberry pi and use that to access SSH when I’m away, but SSH itself is not open to the internet or forwarded in the router.

So far I haven’t seen any attempts to change their user agents. I’ve seen one or two other bots poking around, but nothing to write home about so I’ve left them alone.

I have heard however that changing user agents is a tactic they do indeed employ, especially Claude, so it may be that I’ll eventually have to adapt my defenses.

I’ve been fending off AI bots the last week or so; wrote about it here:

https://gerowen.substack.com/p/the-ai-data-scraping-is-getting-out

I’m not sure. I’ve only noticed it on my TV and have even noticed it with content that I personally ripped from DVDs or Blurays and encoded to x265 or AV1. Since it only affects the TV apps I’m wondering if it isn’t a lack of support for some color space or something by the TV hardware because when I’m encoding I don’t usually change anything about the dimensions, color space, frame-rate, etc., just the codec and quality. If the video is 10 bit, I encode it as 10 bit. If it’s HDR, I pass that thru. I’ve checked with the mobile and desktop app and the web player on content the TVs had issues with and those same files played fine everywhere else, so it’s something specific to the LG and Roku apps for Plex.

I do my own ripping direct from disc and I’ve still seen it happen. So far it’s exclusive to the TV apps so I think it’s something to do with the lack of hardware support for certain things.

Plex has recently started applying a green filter to certain content.

The files Plex has a problem with work just fine in Jellyfin.

I’ve been running Debian stable for years now on everything. My laptop runs it, my home server runs it headless with no GUI installed, my gaming desktop runs it and even my kids run it without issue. If we need a newer version of some desktop app I just get the Flatpak. It’s pretty great and the good thing is that it’s predictable. Once it’s up and running I don’t have to worry about things breaking because of an update.