I like iOS shortcuts. This week, I created an iOS shortcut to scan my Plex library. Now this may seem weird since there is an option to scan a library from the official Plex iOS app and there are also options to scan the library automatically or periodically. For various reasons (excuses), I didn’t like that the official app only lets you scan one library at a time and I have automatic/periodic scans turned off to avoid network drive access, so I created the shortcut to scan from my phone any time I felt like I wanted to trigger it.

1. Create a new iOS shortcut
2. Add the “Get contents of URL” action
3. Get your X-Plex-Token (see instructions on official website)
4. Set the URL in your action to: https://{ip_address}:{port}/library/sections/all/refresh?X-Plex-Token={plex_token}

1. I think this is the wrong sub for this content.
2. This video was terribly hard to get through but the thesis could be summarized as “tech folks want a country that enables them to do tech things and make more money”… ya, duh.
3. Clickbait

I think what you’re looking for is what is sometimes called a “dns load balancer”. Offerings like Azure Traffic Manager or AWS Route 53 do this. You can set up health checks that the service will use to determine if one of your locations is down and then automatically update the DNS record to point to the other one. You can also get clever and do things that allow the DNS to resolve the IP of whichever of your servers is physically closer so you get the best performance. I’m not sure what options there are for selfhosting a DNS service like this, however, these services are extremely affordable – pennies – and run on very reliable infrastructure, which is what you want.

I don’t expect companies to be doing that much anymore.