Recently in Spain we have suffered a complete power outage, with no electricity for a long time. Some were able to have power on their computers with generators, solar panels, etc. And I know you can have data connectivity with SDR or HAM radio. But my question here is, what are some good self-host/local offline software that we can have and use for when something like this happens. I know kiwix, and some other for manuals. Please feel free to share the ones you know and love, can be for any type of thing as long as it works completely offline, I don’t search for any specifics, if it is designed for offline use, just name it. For GNU/Linux only please (using Arch myself BTW). Thanks in advance.
For a media server :
- Audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts (for podcasts it can fetch them online from a RSS link and download them, you don’t need to manually download them)
- Jellyfin for films, series and music (for music you can use jellyfin as backend and another app as frontend if you don’t like jellyfin’s music player, a lot of people find it lacking)
- Komga for reading comics and manga (there’s also Kavita but I haven’t tried it)
- Komf for fetching metadata for comics with Komga or Kavita
- Suwayomi Server for manga (it doesn’t only act as a reader, with extensions it can find manga online and download them; it can sync your reading progress with AniList, and it’s compatible with Tachiyomi if you need that)
- Haven’t found one yet for ebooks. I passionately hate Calibre and wouldn’t touch it again with a 10 foot pole, but a lot of people swear by it so you might give it a try and see whether you love it or hate it (it’s usually one of the two). Be warned though, it will automatically rename all your books and sort them in subfolders in a very stupid way, making it difficult to find anything again manually. So if you want to test it, do it on a copy of your ebooks first, that way if you don’t like it you won’t be stuck with everything in your ebook library renamed weirdly (speaking from experience -_-).
Cloud :
- Nextcloud : your very own locally hosted Cloud.
Everything can be run in docker containers so your distro or even OS doesn’t matter.
Hardware :
- Personally I run everything from my NAS in docker containers but it’s starting to get overloaded so I’m planning to make a dedicated media server on a cheap mini PC like a refurbished Dell OptiPlex SFF.
- You could also go for something like an OrangePi or RaspberryPi if you don’t mind using ARM.
The lack of a good server-side managament software for ebooks keeps astonishing me. I check back ever so often but the recommendations are always the same. It’s either calibre-web, calibre with library on a network share or Kavita.
I’ve seen that audiobookshelf and jellyfin can apparently also handle books but I don’t know how well the support is implemented.
Because I have a very peculiar way of organizing my book collection I need a utility which can export to a specific folder structure and file naming scheme and ideally allows exporting the entire library at once.
audiobookshelf is actually getting there for ebook support :
Any file with an extension EPUB, PDF, CBR, CBZ, AZW3, MOBI is considered an “ebook file”.
AZW3 and MOBI ebook files have limited support and do not keep your progress.
https://www.audiobookshelf.org/guides/ebooks/
What audiobookshelf is really amazing at is not requiring a strict naming scheme, unlike jellyfin it supports lots of different ways to name and organise your files, and it tracks modifications to the files (renaming, moving) without having to rescan the whole library like jellyfin (and without leaving behind entries relating to the old paths that don’t correspond to anything anymore, though that should be finally fixed in jellyfin’s next release !)
I would have liked a dedicated ebook server but I’ll probably try using audiobookshelf in the meantime, of all the various ones I tried it’s the best by far. Just missing a “DNF” status to be perfect 🙂
Realistically, most self-hosted services will work “offline” (no internet connection), provided you also power a local network during the outage as you will have to access it somehow.
This also plays into the other factors, as self-produced power is usually far less than what you’d get from the grid (I.e. you’ll probably want to avoid things like heavy transcoding).
Briar comes to mind, although not directly related to self hosting or Linux
You might also find some of these answers helpful. Some of the services mentioned include Meshtastic, Briar, Kiwix
Use a proxmox server to efficiently host many services on a single machine.
Also easy deployment/backups.
Not really sure what you’re asking. Virtually anything that’s self-hosted will work offline.
I said it pretty clearly. Any type of software designed for offline activity that you know and like, for any type of stuff in a situation like the one I mentioned
Then that was the answer. Everything you selfhost will work offline.
