I’m a huge fan of Ubiquiti APs, and run their Unifi controller on a Raspberry Pi. Sadly, their code is proprietary - but it basically just works.

Maybe see if ‘rclone mount’ solves the problem for ya. Rclone can often be a super handy swiss army knife for stuff like this.

Oh, Brother.

No seriously, buy Brother printers instead and avoid (at least some of) this enshitification.

in my opinion, yes.

I run real-time full band rehearsals with jamulus.io for low latency audio, plus any video tool of your choice (with the audio muted). we use muted Jitsi Meet for the video feed, but it really doesn’t matter. it’s all about the Jamulus audio

Disney

I have seen more (client-owned) La Cie drives fail than I can remember. I wouldn’t touch their crap with a 10 foot cable. Their on-board hardware controllers are the worst, cheapest garbage I’ve encountered on the “name brand” market.

Yes! Murphy’s Stout is also available in the US. Might not be as good as yours tho

The main problem I see you running into is that if they decide for any reason to go after you (even just cause now they want your domain), it won’t matter if they have a solid legal standing or not. They can afford to tie you up in court indefinitely, and you will likely be unable to outlast them.

Source: This is exactly what happened to my family. We have the same last name as a large corporation, and in the early days of the internet we registered a domain based on a name-related slogan they had used in an older commercial compaign. We were just hosting a basic family website and email, and clearly had no conflicting or overlapping IP. We even checked in advance - they did not own a trademark for the slogan or the name.

A few years later, they decided the wanted the domain for themelves, but instead of offering us a fair price to purchase, they first filed a trademark for the slogan and then sued us for the domain. If we’d had the funds to continue fighting we would have eventually won, but we’re just a middle class family and they’re a large multi-national corporation with near infinite funds to pay their lawyers. We lost the domain, and it cost us a small fortune in legal fees fighing it.

Proceed with caution.

I still prefer ‘Xitter’

If for personal access only, ZeroTier might solve your use case.

You might try ZeroTier. You’ll each need a tiny client app, but its super easy to install and setup, and extremely secure. Free to use with up to 25 devices.

Yeah, they provide a “Flow” section where you can setup firewall-like rules to control your flow of traffic. You can configure rules that say, allow ssh to a specific server, but only from a specified devices, while allowing ssh, https and smb to another server from any device, blocking all other TCP traffic. UDP is a little weirder to control, but there’s a decent tutorial with example configs.

I hear about TailScale a lot, and I know its super popular in the self-hosting & linux communities. I haven’t used it myself though, so can’t offer a comparison vs ZeroTier. I found ZeroTier refreshjngly easy to use and install on client devices, so haven’t had reason to look elsewhere yet.

Anyway, have fun with your endeavor!

I just finished building a cloud solution leveraging an AWS EFS (elastic file system), a secure ZeroTier mesh, and a simple EC2 instance (vm) running Samba (or just sshfs/scp/sftp if multi-user file locking isn’t needed). EFS does have some pretty big limitations like the fact users can’t be in more than 16 groups (because it behaves like an NFS mount), and it lacks xattr and ACL support. Still, if you can work around these shortcomings you can build a very secure, surprisingly speedy cloud filesystem. Largest expense is the EFS, but after 30 days infrequently accessed files automatically move to slower storage, which is way cheaper. ZeroTier is an important piece of the puzzle, making your security and encryption a breeze. This allows you to run SMB over the internet without actually exposing any services. Connections are only made through your ZT mesh, which is highly secure.

It provides a web interface for mail (and other useful services). You configure it to send outgoing messages through SMTP, qmail, Sendmail, Postfix, Dovecot, take your pick for the back-end.

Have you looked into self-hosting NextCloud or OwnCloud?

I run kubuntu on a 2012 Intel i5 MBP and it runs like a champ. everything works perfectly, including mic, speakers, webcam… even minor details like the hardware buttons to turn brightness and volume up/down worked straight out of the box with no fuss.

qBitTorrent

8hz-wan-ip

I used to make clocks with the platters and give them to friends and family. Michael’s used to sell inexpensive clock mechanisms that looked really cool against the platter background. I haven’t seen them lately, but I’m sure someone sells them online.