No, Tailscale is an overlay network. In it’s simplest form, it can act as a VPN. But it does much more than that.

Tailscale installs a virtual network device and allocates IP addresses to any device you install it on and sign in with your tailnet. Think of it as a virtual meshed LAN that runs on top of your physical network.

Tailscale becomes your control plane and provides advanced access control options for all your users and devices.

I use Tailscale and share out that server machine’s tailscale IP with just my gaming buddies.

But if you wanna live dangerously, you can port forward from your router to your internal mumble server.

I’ve got a Mumble server running on a little Linux container in my home lab.

Easy to set up and configure, very stable. Nothing special, it does what it is supposed to do, be a low latency, stable voip system, and it does great.

Netbird and Pangolin too.

Tailscale, Netbird, or Pangolin. Foss overlay networks have completely eliminated traditional VPN setups for my self-hosting needs.

Pay for your FOSS! I’ve paid far more for my FOSS than for any proprietary software.

If you believe in subscriptions, then subscribe only to FOSS software like Bitwarden, Tailscale/Netbird, etc.

Find your favorite FOSS projects on Open Collective and support them there.

And above all else, treat FOSS devs and maintainers with the utmost respect! They are the unsung heros who are building the only alternatives to the corpo-dystopian hellscape of proprietary, enshitified, slop software.

Send a message to a dev today, just saying thank you to them for everything, and asking if you can send them a tip if possible.

Folks, let’s treat each other lovingly please, FOSS has freed us, give back what you can, and never take it for granted.

To all the devs, maintainers, tinkerers, supporters, FOSS educators, and helpful community members across the FOSS world, thank you so much, and much love. ♥️

Buying my copy soon!

Aegis for time codes, Nitrokey for physical 2FA tokens.

Favorite heavyweight Type 1 hypervisor: XCP-ng. It’s open source, runs on a ton of enterprise and consumer-grade hardware, has always been rock stable for me, even when forgetting to update it for like 6 months, still ran everything like a champ.

I need to try ProxMox, has some cool features. XCP-ng is pretty intuitive though, UI makes sense and is cleaner than Proxmox. The integration in Proxmox with the Incus project is pretty cool though, especially being able to run VMs and containers and manage them together. I’ve been thinking of trying that and seeing how it goes.

For containers, I just install Debian and run Docker on there. Stable, simple, nothing fancy. If I need something more up to date, I typically use Ubuntu Server.

Yeah, and it’s free for a basic account + up to 100 devices, so plenty for most home lab needs.

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.