That doesn’t seem to be too old of a laptop at all. One thing I’d say is to use an SSD as the main partition you run your apps on, as HDDs might be quite slow.

If you wanna keep the VPS, you can use it as a public inbound gateway + outbound proxy for your homeserver, so traffic looks like it comes in and out of your VPS. I wrote some notes on setting up Tailscale in such a manner, but there’s plenty of other options.

If you don’t wanna keep the VPS, you can front your inbound traffic with Cloudflare Tunnels, and use a commercial VPN to act as a proxy for outbounds. If you don’t have any apps that make frequent network requests (e.g. a Matrix server), then a VPN may not be necessary

You should leave SSH on, especially if if you wanna run it without a monitor, but use key auth and limit it to your LAN only

Thanks for posting here. I’ll update to continuwuity v0.5.0 immediately when I come back to Matrix

Non-federated Matrix server with rooms bridged to Discord/Whatsapp/Slack/whatever, so everyone can join.

Use standard webapps for other stuff like polls, surveys, events etc and send the URL to an announcement channel. Not sure of exact solutions but if one app can do it all and send email reminders for them, thatd be great. Same can be done for VoIP with Jitsi links, or even Z**m links.

Backup the databases if you need the chat logs. All of this should be doable with a small VPS, but a mini PCs cluster could be better

How did you exactly install Express on the router? Did you use an app or something of that kind?

If the VPN provider has WireGuard support, you may wanna use a wireguard client software to connect to it. Flash OpenWRT on the router, install and configure a wireguard interface that connects to Express, then forward packets from behind LAN to that interface so they go through the VPN tunnel. A bit tricky for beginners, but I hope you can make it.

Since OpenVPN protocol seems to become unsupported in the future, Wireguard should be the way to go. Mullvad/IVPN should also support it, and once you know how to set it up it should be usable across many services and devices.

Do you recommend installing VPN apps on separate devices instead of the router?

For flexibility I’d do this. In case I’d wanna switch upstream servers for a single device without affecting others.

If you can run WireGuard on all your devices, you may wanna set up a multihop node that forward outbound traffic to the VPN tunnel via that hub

Desec.io is a solid option - it allows for various types of records like TLSA and SRV. It can also generate scoped API tokens e.g. for “only TXT records of the _acme-challenge subdomain of example.com” to use in automated cert renewals, so pretty good for granularity. It’s also a nonprofit.

I think selfhosting DNS is beneficial when you wanna control your own DNSSEC keys, but you’d need to account for high availability and safety. With that, you could do what’s called a “hidden primary + public secondary” setup to protect your master DNS data from the public prying. You can even use 3rd-party services like ns-global.zone as your secondaries for redundancy and to reduce load on your infra, too. I recommend Technitium and their guidance if you wanna get started

Those are not authoritative DNS providers where you can publish records…

Technically something like DANE can allow you to present DNSSEC-backed self-signed certs and even allow multi-domain matching that removes the need for SNI and Encrypted Client Hello… but until the browsers say it is supported, it’s not

I write homelab docs mostly for user guidance like onboarding, login, and service-specific stuff. This helps me better design for people by putting myself in their shoes, and should act as a reference document for any member to come back to.

Previously I built an Mkdocs-Material website with a nice subdomain for it, but since the project went on maintenance mode, I’m gonna migrate all docs back to a Forgejo wiki since it’s just Markdown anyways. I also run an issue tracker there, to manage the homelab’s roadmaps and features since it’s still evolving.

I find this approach benefiting compared to just documenting code. I’m not an IaC person yet, but I hope when I am, the playbooks should describe themselves for the nitty-gritty stuff anyways. I do write some infra notes for myself and perhaps to onboard maintainers, but most homelab developments happen in the issue tracker itself. The rest I try to keep it simple enough for an individual to understand

Panasonic Let’s Note, SV7 or SZ7 I think. Japanese domestic notebook for enterprises

Nextcloud forked from the old PHP-based ownCloud stack, while Opencloud forked from the Infinite Scale Go-based stack. It also by default preserves the filesystem hierarchy on your server without needing a database, using a storage driver called PosixFS.

The Windows clients currently do support selective syncing so it is on-par with OneDrive. Android client looks to be forked from old Owncloud, and has offline availability too.

Try Syncthing with IgnoreDelete but note that it’s unrecommended. Maybe use Syncthing as an append-only store

due to it missing ideal features

what features do you want? kindly elaborate

XMPP with Snikket could be an easy solution. If you don’t want to talk to the wider web make sure to disable federation.

It’s entirely possible. If the 2 domains are different, you should look into SNI routing using the TCP router instead of HTTP. With the tls.passthrough flag, encryption is kept intact until it reaches the second proxy.

Pihole runs on dnsmasq right? Maybe you could create a cronjob to copy the underlying dnsmasq.conf to other Piholes

Ah, I see. Well I’m glad you found PiHole useful and stick to using it anyhow!

What issues did you have reverse-proxying? For me it was just as simple as pointing to port 5380. Other ports like 53 could be passed on with a layer-4 router

What about the login issues? I’d hope they’ll be integrating with OIDC or some other auth mechanism, but for now managing 2FA creds should make do

Off the top of my head:

• Allows using DoH/DoT/DoQUIC/recursive upstreams without installing extra packages (unbound, cloudflared, etc)
• Allows acting as a DoH/DoH3/DoT/DoQUIC server alongside normal DNS over UDP and TCP
• Allows configuring SOCKS/HTTP proxies for forwarders
• Act as authoritative zone server with DNSSEC signing
• Allows custom responses via plugins (e.g. conditional responses based on client’s IP addresses)
• Accept PROXY Protocol to forward client IPs from trusted load balancers
• All the clustering and zone transfers magic
• DNS64

It really dives deep into the inner workings of DNS and does pretty much anything Pi-Hole does, with many more security and QoL features. Although the UI may feel a bit dated, I’d recommend it to anyone running their own homelab infrastructure beyond just adblocking

Just found out someone else has a similar thing too:

https://github.com/juhovh/tailguard

It seems more flexible and can be used site-to-site, for anyone interested

Thanks for posting this here. I’m not sure what to think about this, just set up mkdocs-material with huge customizations, including the macros plugin and tons of CSS. So it’d be tedious to eventually migrate to the new “component system” as they say.

Welp, should’ve gone with a barebone SSG and configured what I want. Feels like I’m kinda stuck in no man’s land now.