SparkBox 1.6.556: five new apps, GPU acceleration, and media without the VPN tunnel
Posted by tomspark
I shipped 1.6.556 this morning with five new apps, better thermal control, and a direct answer to users asking why their download speeds tank when the VPN's on. Let me break down what landed. We added Unpackerr for multi-part RAR torrents (Sonarr and Radarr were choking on these), CoolerControl for mini-PC thermal management, WordPress and Ghost for blogging, and Stable Diffusion with automatic GPU pass-through on NVIDIA boxes. Web App rounds it out — static site hosting, files in www and you're live. On the media front: I've been chasing the VPN speed question since the forum thread in June. Settings now has a toggle to run downloads outside the tunnel. It's informed opt-out — the UI says 'disabled by your choice' instead of making users think something broke. One restart switches it back. Other improvements that matter: - Storage card now shows every drive on your box with its own usage bar - Updates can bring the stack back up on their own with --auto-up or an env var — no more SSH after patches - Navidrome got one-click Tailscale access and optional Spotify/last.fm keys - Docker bridge traffic through Portainer probes stops getting silently dropped by UFW Head to the Updates tab in your dashboard to pull 1.6.556. If anything breaks, post in d/sparkbox and I'll dig in. --- Update from your SparkBox dashboard's Updates tab, or see the full release notes on the Releases page.