Always eat your greens!
Have you looked into Tailscale or an equivalent solution like Netbird?
You could set up a tailnet, create unique tags for each machine, add both machines to the tailnet, and then set up each machine’s network interface to only go through the tailnet.
Then you just use Tailscale’s ACLs with the tags to isolate those machines, making sure they can only talk to whatever central device(s) or services you want them to, but also stopping them from talking to or even seeing each other.
I’ve used two, NameCheap, and PorkBun.
Hated Namecheap, would never use them again. Janky pricing, tons of email spam, terrible UI.
Porkbun has been pretty great. Simple, solid prices, easy to use, no issues for about a year and a half.
Speak for yourself, Jellyfin has been awesome for me. Fantastic piece of software.
Jellyfin is love, Jellyfin is life.
If you’re very comfortable with containerization, networking, and security practices, plus you are a pretty decent full stack web dev, sure.
It’s pretty trivial to set up a separate business internet line from your local ISP. Depending on the volume of traffic, a basic load manager and reverse proxy, combined with strong firewalls and container safety would be sufficient for most SMB needs.
You don’t need much power to host a basic website. Setting up a local box with a low-impact distro, Docker, and some solid control-plane MGMT software should be plenty to host several dozen SMB websites.
There are a lot of technical and even legal considerations though. Do these small businesses need a web app on their site? Do they need a storefront? What about member-only content locked securely behind an authentication layer? Does your local ISP have rate limitations? Does your city/state/country have restrictions on offering business services like that? What is your liability if your setup gets hacked and your client’s data is stolen/exposed?
Ultimately, you have to answer the question: Why shouldn’t those businesses just go with an easy pre-made hosting solution like Squarespace, Wix, etc? Not saying there aren’t good answers to that, but from a business perspective, the businesses will want to know that.
As with anything in business, ask yourself, what are you able to offer that they can’t get easily somewhere else? I used to work for a tiny MSP that offered in-house data backups. Our clients paid a good chunk of money to have us backup their data to our own servers. I didn’t say anything at the time, but our clients could have gotten much more secure and faster backup services for cheaper using something like Backblaze or Synology’s S2 cloud backups.
Don’t find yourself unable to clearly and concisely explain to your clients what you can give them that they cannot easily get somewhere else. If it’s purely the principle of the thing, that’s totally valid, but make sure that’s what you’re selling to them, and also what they are looking for.
Dang, that’s too bad. Hopefully one day!
I love localsend.
Works on Linux, Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac. It is basically an OS agnostic Airdrop.
It’s FOSS, so you can go to the Github and build from source for OpenBSD, but I have no idea if that would work.
Jellyfin for only music streaming would probably be fine, if it’s just you using it. PiHole would be good, you could probably get a low impact distro on there to run Docker containers, but only pretty light services on it.
About to build my first really nice homelab NAS for Jellyfin, archiving, etc. targeting between 30-40TB if all goes well :)
?..It’s a great tool that provides all the security of VPN access without having to struggle with the more technical aspects of spinning up your own VPN, and it’s zero cost for personal use.
You could also use Netbird if you wanted, but I have been using Tailscale extensively and it’s awesome.
IP white lists and firewall exceptions will help, but exposing ports on your home router is almost always a bad idea, especially for something as trivial as a game server.
I would highly recommend Tailscale. It’s free for up to 3 users, and if you have more friends than that, I would have them all sign up with free accounts and then share your laptop device with their tailnets.
It’s very easy to setup and use, costs nothing, and will be far more secure than opening ports and trying to set up IP white lists, protocol limitations, etc.
Tailscale creates something called an “overlay network” it’s basically a virtual LAN that exists on top of your real network and can be extended to other people and devices over the internet. It’s fully encrypted, fast, and like I said, very easy to set up.
I’ve been thinking of using Linkwarden for a while now. As my computer usage spreads across more and more devices, having a single place to go for all my bookmarks would be fantastic.
Performance and how configurable things are, plus ease of use.
For instance, my default router/modem device from my ISP was super clunky and confusing. I needed to set up some custom port forwarding and firewall rules. The aftermarket router I bought was faster, had way better wireless coverage, and the UI was so much easier to set up the configs I needed.
So it’s up to you, from what you said, seems like you probably would be good with the default from your ISP.
For general system stats, I like btop. It runs in the terminal, so you can monitor it through SSH remotely. It also is much more readable than some of the other older top process monitors.
Docker desktop is a nice GUI interface for local docker container management, Portainer if you want something more enterprise grade.
XCP-ng or Proxmox if you need a bare metal hypervisor. Both open source, powerful, mature, and have large communities with lots of helpful documentation.
I think you can migrate ESXi VMs directly to XCP-ng. I have moved onto it about 6 months ago and it has been solid. Steep learning curve, but really great once you get the hang of it, and enterprise grade if you need stuff like HA clustering and complex virtual networking solutions.
XCP-ng hypervisor main box for my VMs, mostly Ubuntu Server but some Alma Linux VMs too. TrueNAS Core for my NAS box.
Might start switching my VMs from Ubuntu Server to Debian soon, we’ll see.
Haha totally!
When I first deployed Nextcloud, it was just like this. Random crashes, lockups, weird user signin issues, slow and clunky.
But one day it just started working and was super stable. I didn’t do anything, still not sure what fixed it lol.
Yeah, and it’s free for a basic account + up to 100 devices, so plenty for most home lab needs.