

Ok, I misread what you were linking to. Yeah, that’s pretty bad to allow actual streaming of content to unauthed users. I agree they should not be encouraging anyone to set this up to be publicly accessible until those are fixed. Or at least add a warning.

You might be surprised how little power it’s sipping when sitting idle. Unnecessary disk accesses might be the biggest power use in those hours, but that’s more likely to cost you due to wear and tear and eventual replacement of the drive.
I recommend buying a Kill-a-watt and monitoring your power consumption on the server for a week or two. Then do some math to see how much it’s actually costing your energy bill. If it’s actually considerable, then try using tools like
powertopto see if you can determine what’s generating all the activity.