Server Dual Location as Backup?

[MayBeABanana]

I think I know the answer, which is "no, it's not possible" but figured I'd ask.

I currently have Jellyfin running on my PC because I use Nord Meshnet and my NAS to stream anywhere (which actually is working great!). However, I can't run my PC 24/7, especially if I go on a trip or something, so I was considering installing it on my DietPi instance. The thing is, my PC is strong, hearty, beefy, while my DietPi is puny, weak, stringbean (Raspberry Pi 4, and I think 4gb ram?). I'd like to be able to use my PC as the main server instance when I am on it, but have the DietPi kick in when I shut my PC off.

Is this at all possible?

[TheDreadPirate]

What you could do is use your DietPi to wake up your PC. You'd need to configure your PC to wake up on magic packets and then setup your DietPi to send those out. Then when you're done you can use remote desktop to shut down your PC.

Your other option is to get a low power Intel based PC. The Intel N100 is the go-to right now.

[pcm]

It's possible, but not exactly the way you're imagining it to be. You'd technically never shut off your DietPi computer (or the Intel N100).
And you'd have a nginx running on another Pi as a load balancer.

Upstream to your load-balancer Pi you'd have your beefy-PC as one node and the low-power Pi as the other node. You'd do weighted load-balancing so that while your beefy-PC is on it takes almost all the load of serving up jellyfin.

And when you shutdown your beefy-PC, nginx, acting as a load-balancing-reverse-proxy, will direct all the load to the DietPi after noticing that the beefy-PC node is offline. All this will happen by design, because that's what load-balancers are designed to do.


NOTE: You'd want to also share some jellyfin directories between the two nodes.
So, you'll need to put the jellyfin directories on your NAS as well, besides your media files.
At the very least you'd want to mount a shared storage as /var/lib/jellyfin on both your machines so that your data and metadata stay consistent.

[ThomasPGH]

/

I think I know the answer, which is "no, it's not possible" but figured I'd ask.

This is theoretically possible but not in real time because you would have to copy/mirror the database between the two. So, if your intention is to watch a film during the switchover, this is not going to work. If you switch over with a downtime of a minute or so, this can easily be done.

Watching a film certainly breaks here, in particular when transcoding is involved. Assuming the transcode folder is accessible by both machines because it's on a NAS you would only have to worry about the database. And although Sqlite supports a mirror database natively, this is currently not used by/implemented in Jellyfin.