I think a lot of companies view their free plan as recruiting/advertising — if you use TailScale personally and have a great experience then you’ll bring in business by advocating for it at work.

Of course it could go either way, and I don’t rely on TailScale (it’s my “backup” VPN to my home network)… we’ll see, I guess.

Hopefully you can publish in an open-access journal — if not it would be great if you could share an arXiv preprint :)

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.

— Richard P. Feynman

I think the same is true for a lot of folks and self hosting. Sure, having data in our own hands is great, and yes avoiding vendor lock-in is nice. But at the end of the day, it’s nice to have computers seem “fun” again.

At least, that’s my perspective.

Whatever you decide for your laptop, I’m a proponent of a barebones off-site setup if you’re trying for 3-2-1 backup or similar.

I use a raspberry pi 3 with a single HD (ZFS) retaining some number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots. Daily rsync, everything over WireGuard+VPS (TailScale would work too).

Same — rsync to a pi 3 with a (single) ZFS drive at family’s house. Retain some daily/weekly/monthly snapshots.

I have a (free) VPS with static IPv4 which is how I connect everything.

Both the VPS and the remote site have limited network speed (I think 50Mbps for VPS), so the initial sync was done sneakernet (well…“airplane net”). Nightly rsync is no problem bandwidth-wise, and is mostly just any new videos I’ve uploaded to my local Immich instance.

Fail2ban config can get fairly involved in my experience. I’m probably not doing it the right way, as I wrote a bunch of web server ban rules — anyone trying to access wpadmin gets banned, for instance (I don’t use WordPress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be accessible from my public facing reverse proxy).

I just skimmed my nginx logs and looked for anything funky and put that in a ban rule, basically.

It’s mostly so that I can have SSL handled by nginx (and not per-service), and also for ease of hosting multiple services accessible via subdomains. So every service is its own subdomain.

Additionally, my internal network (as in, my physical LAN) does not have any port forwarding enabled — everything is over WireGuard to my VPS.

My method:

VPS with reverse proxy to my public facing services. This holds SSL certs, and communicates with home network through WireGuard link configured on my router.

Local computer with reverse proxy for all services. This also has SSL certs, and handles the same services as the VPS, so I can have local/LAN speeds. Additionally, it serves as a reverse proxy for all my private services, such as my router/switches/access point config pages, Jellyfin, etc.

No complaints, it mostly just works. I also have my router override DNS entries for my FQDN to resolve locally, so I use the same URL for accessing public services on my LAN.

Getting TLS certs will be complicated

I just use Let’s Encrypt with a wildcard domain — same certs for public and private facing domains. I’m sure this isn’t best practice, but it’s mostly just for me so I’m not too worried :)

Yeah I don’t expose Jellyfin over the Internet, so it doesn’t matter for me, and wouldn’t work at all over WAN (unless VPN’d to home network).

Also, it’s all reverse proxied, and there’s nothing preventing having two Jellyfin hostnames, e.g., jf-local.mydomain.com and jf-public.mydomain.com.

Another fun trick you can play is to use a private IP on your public DNS records. This is useful for Jellyfin on Chromecast for instance — it uses 8.8.8.8 for DNS lookup (and ignores your router settings), so it wants a fully qualified domain name. But it has no problem accessing local hosts, so long as it’s from 8.8.8.8’s record.

I have set up local DNS entries (with Pi-Hole) to point to my srrver, but I don’t know if it possible to get certs for that, since it is not a real domain.

So long as your certs are for your fully qualified domain there’s no problem. I do this, as do many people — mydoman.com is fully qualified, but on my own network I override the DNS to the local address. Not a problem at all — DNS is tied to the hostname, not the IP.

Any chance you have a DMZ set up on your router?

On your router, are there any settings specific to any host (other than the server maybe)? For example, a static IP or a port forwarded rule.

Do you have a VPN on the phones? Can you traceroute from your phone to the server and post that? (I like PingTools for Android.) You should have 1 hop (you -> server, nothing in between).

Can you verify that you are on the same wifi including same wifi channel? Phone on 5GHz but Linux box on 2.4GHz, for example.

Some mobile clients make it easy to accidentally downvote. I sometimes see that I accidentally downvoted a comment from time to time.

PingTools has been useful for me (though I mostly just use it for iperf).

“Over the last 3–4 months, we have observed that CPUs initially working well deteriorate over time, eventually failing,” he claims. “The failure rate we have observed from our own testing is nearly 100%, indicating it’s only a matter of time before affected CPUs fail.”

Not used to seeing significant age-related degradation in silicon used under normal conditions. Sounds like Intel dun goofed…

For a while Intel’s QuickSync was I think one of the better for transcoding (e.g., for Jellyfin). Didn’t see mention of this in the article, I wonder if AMD is on par now?

I think this is the real question.

Did they quit and join a competitor who offered a better WFH option? Or did they get a taste of the good parts of white collar pandemic life — no commute, flexible hours, work from anywhere — and decide that actually, their entire identity is not just their professional life, and maybe they should retire to see the world/spend time with family?

There are definitely some high profile rage quits over return to office, but I think there are a lot more of the “hey this was fun but time to take care of myself” quits.

This suggests nginx options to use re: hostname. Unsure of your nginx config…

https://forum.syncthing.net/t/web-gui-over-nginx-proxy-only/13767

403 Forbidden doesn’t necessarily mean a bad login attempt. Are you sure that’s the error? My troubleshooting steps would be to access directly (no nginx), and look at the logs for a successful login. Then, look try to login with nginx, and look at those logs (both access.log and error.log on nginx, and any/all logs from syncthing). Find out where the two cases diverge and go from there.

Does syncthing have a domain name specified? If it doesn’t know its domain name it may work from IP directly but not via reverse proxy. Just a hunch.