I have an old laptop lying around and I have been meaning to self host some stuff on it but never got around to it.

My biggest limitation is that I only have WIFI and I do not control the network. It’s basically your default residential WIFI network.

The only thing I actually need is self-hosted cloud. What can I utilize this laptop for?

  • Bluefruit@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    11 months ago

    I started off with pi hole when i started messing around with an old laptop for self hosting. My advice is setup what you think is useful.

    To access the server outside your home, tailscale is a great option. Fairly simple to setup especially if its just you accessing the server.

    Reverse proxy would be best if you intend to let others acess your servers services often or if you dont wanna mess with tunnels. I settled on cloudflare tunnels because i didn’t want another thing to turn on to acess my server outside my house.

    When I didn’t have a carrier grade nat to deal with, i used caddy server for automatically getting ssl certs from lets encrypt and reverse proxy all in one. I really liked that once i got it setup.

    • driveway@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      4·
      11 months ago

      I can’t be connected to Tailscale and some other VPN at the same time, can I?

      • Sethayy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        11 months ago

        Depends on the device, but on devices like android no.

        I can’t say I’ve gone through with it myself, but in theory you could have a host somewhere connected to a VPN that you send a your tailscale traffic through as an exit node

      • habitualTartare@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        11 months ago

        On Android and I believe IOS it’s a single connection. I would start with the basic functionality (also don’t create a tailscale account with GitHub bc it does weird things with sharing if you ever want to have multiple users).

        Once you’ve got the VPN and storage working I can think of two options to give you the functionality of 2 vpns

        1. tasker is an android app that can let you automate a lot. It might let you switch vpns when opening say your storage app and switch back a bit easier than toggling it in settings.
        2. setup your lap-server at home with an outgoing public VPN so traffic goes mobile device> tailscale> public VPN. Essentially acting like you’re home using your public VPN. This may take some tinkering to work properly, especially when you’re home on the same network. Plus you would definitely see a Network speed impact on your phone.
      • Lunch@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        11 months ago

        Tailscale and Mullvad VPN recently partnered up to solve this exact issue. So in the admin panel of tailscale you could set up a device as an exitnode and then have that run through one of Mullvads servers. It’s all very neat and simple 😊

        • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
          3·
          11 months ago

          Exit nodes Subnet Routers KICK ASS.

          Makes it so my RPi enables me to manage any device on my home network from anywhere. I can print from my laptop or phone to my home printer. No need for a Tailscale client on hardware devices.

          An Exit Node provides a LAN exit path for connected devices - so any of my TS connected devices can route to the internet through my home network, gaining RPi DNS filtering along the way (though I don’t do this for performance reasons, it’s just an example).

          Edited to correct my misuse of exit node, and clarify the difference between it and Subnet routing.

        • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          11 months ago

          Tailscale only requires one app install, on a device in your network.

          That device can be configued as a subnet router (providing local network access to Tailscale connections).

          Then using either the Funnel or Serve option, remote devices can access your Tailnet without a client installed.

          Just an option, another way of achieving similar results (though with different capabilities) as Cloudflare.

          Edit: Funnel enables non-TS clients to access TS resources. Serve enables foreign TS clients to access your TS network.

        • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
          11·
          11 months ago

          Generally Tailscale uses an app on every device to be a member of the Tailscale Virtual Mesh network.

          Though by using the Funnel, Serve, and Subnet Router features you can access things without the Tailscale client app.

  • DontTakeMySky@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    11 months ago

    With most consumer wifi networks you can usually enable port forwarding. That would let you access services from anywhere.

    Personally I would set up a Wireguard VPN server on the laptop and enable port forwarding only for the Wireguard port. This will let you access your laptop from anywhere, and it will protect you by limiting your attack surface (basically you only need to have a device Wireguard connection and you don’t need to worry as much about securing every other service you want to run).

    Then I’d set up dynamic DNS with any DNS provider so you don’t need to keep track of a changing IP.

    Then you can install whatever services you want on the laptop and you’ll be able to access them from anywhere by connecting to the Wireguard VPN. It does mean you can’t easily let a friend access a service on your laptop, but the tradeoff is you don’t have to worry as much about security while you’re learning.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    91·
    11 months ago

    You can, but if you don’t control the main router and can’t do any port forwarding, it will be hard to make it accessible from outside your LAN.

    • habitualTartare@lemmy.worldEnglish
      121·
      11 months ago

      Tailscale + truenas is a simple solution that should allow OP access outside the network without any network config. E

    • ShunkW@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      Yeah the best hope is that upnp is turned on. I think that’s the protocol that allows automatic port forwarding to happen

  • SpicySquid@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    11 months ago

    I think self-hosted cloud is a vague statement, but I think with your network infrastructure you will be limited in what you can do. I think cloudflare tunnel could be a good option for getting the device available online.

    Then the self-hosted part. There are so many things you can look into. You can run everything in Docker, install the software you want directly on your laptop, and much more.

    You’ll likely also need a reverse proxy. Can use nginx proxy manager, traefik, or something similar for that.

    What are your goals with the self-hosted cloud? That would help you in making it easy to find resources and others here to give you advice.

    Edit: typo’s

    • driveway@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      What are your goals with the self-hosted cloud?

      I have about several dozen GB of files that I currently sync with Syncthing between my devices. The only downsides I can see is that it takes the same amount of space on all my devices and it’s hard to add a new device to the group. I’d like to store the files on the laptop instead and be able to browse, access them from my other devices (mainly Linux and Android), ideally through the internet.

      • netburnr@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        11 months ago

        Exposing your internal devices to the internet is not suggested unless you know how to secure it behind a reverse proxy.

      • SpicySquid@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        Dozens of GB sounds like there’s a lot of media files to me. I’d not share that via Syncthing. Assuming that is correct: Wouldn’t a media server like Jellyfin be a better fit? Or if it’s photos, I recommend Immich. Note that Immich is under active development and should not be your only place to store photos.

        • driveway@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          Yes, that’s why I’m looking into alternatives. Could I use jellyfin with the limitations that I have?

          • SpicySquid@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            11 months ago

            I think that should be possible. You’ll likely need to get Jellyfin running with that cloudflare tunnel. There are probably alternatives to cloudflare tunnel as well, but I’m not very familiar with it. I believe there are some limitations with the tunnel, so you will have to check that out. Otherwise there should be no issue.

      • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        Switch to Resilio Sync, it has a sync-on-demand feature called Selective Sync, where you can browse the share and select files to sync now.

        It’s a feature of Resilio I really like, but I rely on Syncthing for daily use because Resilio kills phone memory (it stores the index in ram), and it’s much more resource intensive on my file server.

  • hungover_pilot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    11 months ago

    I have a laptop motherboard setup with proxmox running:

    • plex
    • radarr,sonarr,prowlarr
    • opnsense
    • foundry VTT
    • pi-hole
    • unifi controller
    • qbittorrent
    • kavita

    This is running on an i5-1135 with 40gigs of memory. If your frugal about how you have stuff setup you can pack alot of services into old laptops.

    • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      If I may ask, how exactly do you use OPNsense? Is it a gateway between the WAN and LAN interfaces, or do you just use it for the LAN-facing services?

      • hungover_pilot@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        Yes its my main router. Everything comes into the laptop across one interface setup as a trunk that includes vlans for WAN, LAN, etc. From there proxmox has a vlan aware linux bridge setup that connects to all the VMs/containers that I run. The VM virtual interfaces get tagged with whatever network I want the host to be part of.

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    When you say WiFi to you mean that you only have WiFi access or does the labtop not have a Ethernet port? If you have a wired connection I would get either a thunderbolt or usb3 adapter to hardwire it as a hardwired connection will be more stable even on USB speeds.

    The OS will depend on what you want to host. If its a older system with less than 8 GB of ram I would just install Debian with docker. You can find premade docker compose files online which should make deploying software easy.

    If you have plenty of hardware you could install Proxmox and then a few VMs.

    Edit2:

    Actually I take back what I said, don’t use Kubesail. I went back and tried it and it has a lot of issues. If you want remote access consider a VPN or remote vm

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    3·
    11 months ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    DNS Domain Name Service/System
    HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
    IP Internet Protocol
    SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
    VPN Virtual Private Network
    VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
    nginx Popular HTTP server

    6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.

    [Thread #379 for this sub, first seen 27th Dec 2023, 13:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • Nik282000@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Without being able to set a static ip and forward ports you cant host services and point to them with a domain, like driveway-home.com or something.

    But I think cloudflare has a service that lets you connect remotely without needing static ip’s (some one else will know the name). If you were to use that then you can use your laptop to host pretty much anything on the Awesome Selfhosted List.

    • deelayman@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      CloudFlared is the application you run on your server, and CloudFlare tunnels are what it connects with. You get the same outcome as a ddns but it functions differently under the hood. You also need a domain name for this I think.

      DuckDNS might be a good option to start out with.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      21·
      11 months ago

      I would advise against port forwarding without at least a proper firewall with isolation. It is very very dangerous to expose things to the internet and it will backfire at some point, sometimes without your knowledge.

      Back when I first started I used a service called kubesail https://kubesail.com/

      Now that I have way more hardware I just use a VPS on Linode to route traffic.