I feel like you have the wrong idea of what hacking acting a actually is… But yes, as long as you don’t do anything too stupid line forwarding all of your ports or going without any sort of firewall, the chances of you getting hacked are very low…

As for DDOSing, you can get DDOSed with or without self hosting all the same, but I wouldn’t worry about it.

Telegram

Check out this video

It goes over all of the steps of setting it up.

GPU passthrough has been pretty good for a while. The reason why Linus couldn’t get it working reliably was because iirc, he tried to do it on windows… I’ve done it before with a single gpu and have very recently set it up again, now that I have a 2nd one and gotta say, it’s pretty damn good…

My hard drives are also 2nd hand and they’ve been reliable so far, I just generally know it’s bad practice…

My tip for saving money: buy as much as possible 2nd hand. You do not need the latest of latest gen hardware for a NAS/Homelab. This is excluding storage, and ESPECIALLY hard drives. Those you should absolutely buy new.

As for setting it up… My recommendation is to use TrueNAS scale with either RAIDz1 or RAIDz2, giving you either 1 or 2 drives of parity, in case something fails…

As for remote access, you can run a wireguard VPN server in a VM, allowing you to access it from anywhere, as long as you’re connected to said VPN.

Idk if it has that, as I just run a SMB share to achieve the same functionality

Files-on-demand? Meaning… Sync or?

Nextcloud… It’s self hostable with a really good Mac app

Go on ebay or your local 2nd hand market and search “mini PC” or “Office computer”…

What is the point of paying for a VNC client when there are 100 other free VNC clients?

For my main server only… If HP iLO is to be believed, averaging around 130W.

Running: deluge, homarr, jellyfin, lidarr, navidrome, nextcloud, prowlarr, sonarr, whoogle and a minecraft server (VM) on TrueNAS Scale.

As for everything else (my router, switch and DNS/DHCP server, which is a separate machine, you can add another maybe 50W on top of it…

Depends, if you want something that just works, install TrueNAS scale or CasaOS. Or if you wanna have more flexibility, try out proxmox…

I already have my own network with stuff and things… it’s mostly just the simple stuff (TrueNAS scale, pihole, wireguard, nextcloud and other things like that). But yeah, outside my mac, I have literally 0 experience with BSD…

I am very much into the nitty gritty of Linux (I use Alpine fyi) the problem is, pf/opnsense aren’t based on Linux…

And I also don’t really know how to set them up… Yk as routers, mainly because my internet comes through PPPoE and I just cannot for the life of me figure out how to pass that through to a VM. I bound the VM to its own NIC, did everything, did not work…

yep, did not fix it

I’ve tried both and both were hell

I recently decided to get more serious about self hosting and gotta say, use TrueNAS scale, just do it, literally everything is 1 click… While it can be complicated, it is most definitely worth it, not just to stick it to big tech, but because some of the selfhosted apps genuinely provide a better experience than centralized alternatives. NextCloud surprised me especially with how genuinely nice it is. Installed it, got an SSL certificate and replaced google services almost entirely in a few hours of work.

I’ve still got a few things I wanna do which look very complicated… Stuff like a mail server and pfsense (the stuff of nightmares) are among the 1st on my list…

Though, I gotta say, my particular version of iLO4 (2.77) seems to have some bug with the HTML console where it sometimes stops receiving inputs after POST, which is rather annoying…

It’s not really a huge deal for me, as I generally prefer using SSH and the sort for remote access either way. And besides, the HTML console is clunky, but it gets the job done.