Hi there!
Wondering what types of setup people have that allow them to, while the internet is down, still watch/stream media from their servers. I have a stacked Jellyfin library that, and would like to see this feature/setup in my own house. My Unraid server is on the other side of the house from where the living room is. Is there actually a sane way to achieve this?
How do you not do that? It’s all in your local network, how would it not work offline…?
I have everything connected over Tailscale, and strictly only use IPs delegated through this system. So i realise now that I have to step away from that if I want to make it work locally :P
Talescale proper gives you an external dependency (and a lot of security risk), but the underlying technology (wireguard) does not have the same limitation. You should just deploy wireguard yourself; it’s not as scary as it sounds.
What is the issue with the external dependency? I would argue that consumer routers have near universal shit security, networking is too complex for the average user, and there’s a greater risk opening up ports and provisioning your own VPN server (on consumer software/hardware). The port forwarding and DDNS are essentially “external dependencies”.
Mesh VPN clients are all open source. I believe Tailscale are currently implementing a feature where new devices can’t connect to your mesh without pre-approval from your own authorized devices, even if they pass external authentication and 2FA (removing the dependency on tailscale servers in granting authorization, post-authentication).
When I first got into self-hosting I started out using Tailscale, at that point i didn’t know better and figured it was all or nothing. It has actually worked flawlessly to be fair. Probably not the best or smartest decision of my life. But am now slowly wanting to turn to just a clean WireGuard setup.
If all the devices are in the same network you should be able to stream content even without internet. I had to wait for 5 days to my ISP set up my internet on my new address and I watched my jellyfin library in the meantime with no problems.
You shouldn’t have the do anything specific at all, local network stuff works without internet and Jellyfin doesn’t rely on any internet servers like Plex does for authentication.
Plex allows you to add a list of local IPs that can access your server without authentication, just have to be sure to do it while your internet is up or else you won’t be able to log in to edit the setting.
At least for me, this works out of the box.
Some requirements:
- All the devices need to be on the same network
- DNS needs to work or you have to use IP adresses for connecting. I’ve configured local DNS on my router.
My setup is pretty simple. I use static DNS on my router, which points my jellfin domain to the local address when on my LAN, and I set up DHCP to point my devices to use my router for DNS. It’s incredibly simple, so all I do is type in my jellyfin domain and it works optimally wherever I am.
I actually had my internet go out for a couple hours and we were able to watch our content just fine.
