All Good Things Come to an End

A word about /Media and /Plex, and why they now sit behind an application.

This mirror has been serving roughly 5 TB of traffic every single day against a 40 TB library backed by a wall of physical disks in my home. That kind of pull is not sustainable for one person to keep running on a home connection. The wear on the disks, plus the constant bandwidth contention, was starting to cause outages and buffering for my family and friends on the Plex server that lives on the very same storage.

I really didn't want to take it down. But a handful of people abusing the open mirror made it impossible to keep this wide open to the world. A small bit of friction is what's left to give it a chance at staying online for the people who will actually use it responsibly.

So here is how it works now, and it is deliberately simple, no passwords:

• Apply once with your email and a short, honest note about how you'd use it.
• Confirm your email so the application reaches review.
• Once approved, enter your email here and we send you a magic link.
• Clicking the link whitelists the IP you're on for 90 days.
• If your IP changes (new ISP, mobile, travel), just enter your email again for a fresh link.

If you'd like to help cover the disk replacements and the bandwidth bill, there's a donate link in the footer. No pressure, ever.