I’ve been toying with this idea but with a mesh network, in my case nebula, after experiencing a similar frustration with limitations on most client devices when trying to connect to multiple VPNs.

One question I’ve been trying to answer is if routing all of these devices to a single vpn endpoint has any negative effects on privacy. Would cycling the IP randomly help to prevent trackers from putting together a profile of activity?

I guess what I'm getting at is now instead of them tracing your activity to one browser or device, they can more easily group multiple devices since they're all using the same VPN IP.

I use Joplin and it works great for this exact thing. Anytime I discover a new command that fixes something I’ll throw it into my Joplin notebook. “New Server Cheatsheet” goes to list in order common operations and commands for setting up SSH, UfW, making a non-root user, configuring wireguard, etc. I have hundreds of notes by now and they’re easily found via search bar.

ELI5 please. What are the benefits over unbound?

I prefer to shy away from those companies, especially Google, for moral/privacy reasons.

I’m not the one making wild accusations about somebody wanting to selfhost a gpu server to edit…incest porn or whatever it is you’re on about.

No idea what lie you think I’m telling. 🤷‍♂️

That’s such a weird leap in logic to jump to. Are you okay?

amazonads has already been blocked but I just blocked amazon and waiting to see if that does the trick.

Another alternative is run Jellyfin and all of your *arr apps as docker containers and run them through a docker container called gluetun. Essentially this will route all incoming traffic (tvdb, torrents, etc) through a vpn and all outgoing (sonarr, Jellyfin, etc web gui) can be accessed locally.

Thanks. That helped a lot. It gave me a good basis for some further googling.

It ended up that the Internal Clock of the hardware interface was deselected in alsamixer. Enabling it fixed the no audio issue.

For the channel remapping I tried a bunch of different config files until finally one actually managed to not be ignored. It's absurd how many separate configuration files and sound settings menus exist for linux audio and there's no guarantee the one your editing is even being used. An absolute mess IMO and it's no wonder people shy away from linux for desktop purposes.

Funny enough, despite getting the channel remapping to work, it's completely ignored unless you put pulseaudio -k into your user profile. And even now, because the remapped output device doesn't show up on boot, it has to be manually set to the default output every login.

At least I have the right channels mapped though.

I love linux but god damn is it a hot mess for the simple stuff.

This looks great for privacy but their servers are hosted only in Sweden, which might be an issue since I’ll need good latency and high bandwidth.

Looks promising. Do you know what their network speeds are? I can’t seem to find that in their FAQs.

Thanks. I actually selfhost my backup server. So I'm not backing up to a VPS. I use the VPS as a hub in a hub and wheel configuration to connect multiple servers (including a dedicated backup server).

I’m a massive Nextcloud fan and have a server up and running for many years now.

But I understand all of the downvoted commenters. It is clunky and buggy as hell at times. Maybe it’s less noticeable when you’re running a single user instance, but once you have non tech literate users using it you begin to notice how inferior it is to the big boys like google drive in some aspects.

That said, I personally have a decent tolerance for fiddling and slight frustrations as a trade off for avoiding privacy disrespecting and arguably evil corporations.

I would recommend everybody looking for a gdrive, Dropbox, one drive alternative to at least give Nextcloud a go.

Do you mean leantime.io?

I have a workstation I use for video editing/vfx as well as gaming. Because of my work, I'm fortunate to have the latest high end GPUs and a 160" projector screen. I also have a few TVs in various rooms around the house.

Traditionally, if I want to watch something or play a video game, I have to go to the room with the jellyfin/plex/roku box to watch something and am limited to the work/gaming rig to play games. I can't run renders and game at the same time. Buying an entire new pc so I can do both is a massive waste of money. If I want to do a test screening of a video I'm working on to see how it displays on various devices, I have to transfer the file around to these devices. This is limiting and inefficient to me.

I want to be able to go to any screen in my house: my living room TV, my large projector in my studio room, my tablet, or even my phone and switch between:

• my workstation display running on a Window 10 VM
• my linux VM with youtube or jellyfin player I use as a daily driver
• a fedora or Windows VM dedicated to gaming, maybe SteamOS
• maybe a friend comes over for a LAN party and we both can game without having to set up a 2nd rig
• I want to host an LLM or stablediffusion server without having to buy a new GPU with enough VRAM to run SDXL

So each time I get shut down is during a large extended data transfer. I have my VPS server set up as a VPN hub that connects multiple servers. So typically when my traffic gets diverted to a black hole by DO, there was a consistent roughly 35MB/s inbound/outbound vpn traffic stream for 4-5 hours going through the VPS. My server gets shut down for 3-4 hours and I get a email notice that my server was under a massive DDoS attack and they diverted traffic to a black hole. I always respond informing them that it’s not a DDoS and explain the situation. They typically respond with “Utilize a service like Cloudfare which has DdoS protection”.

I’ve been really happy with them as a provider otherwise but this is a dealbreaker for me.

I ended up going with migadu. Seems great so far. Already up and running with 3 domains and dozens of aliases.

Funny you mention that. I was about to make a post about Nebula earlier. I learned about it through YouTuber apalrd a few months back and it seems perfect. I’m still trying to understand some of the complexities when utilizing a service that requires circumventing the mesh network for public access such as Nextcloud. I’ll probably make a post about this after I’ve done some more research. I think there’s some good discussion to be had about such a setup.

I appreciate your insight. That’s good to know. My journey into self hosting started with searching for alternatives to google products so I’m naturally hesitant to touch anything under their umbrella.

Which one of those do you suggest over the other? GPT4 suggests LibreElec might run better on lower spec hardware like the Pi.

I’m curious in a more in depth breakdown of your setup if you don’t mind. What is latency like and how are you handling switching?

How are you handling displays and keyboard/mouse? Also what VM software?

Can I hijack this thread to ask if any of these recommendations have iOS apps? Vikunja looks the most enticing to me but seems they don’t have an iOS app sadly.

My network is currently setup with wireguard. I have a VPS operating as a hub within a hub and spoke (or is it hub and wheel?) configuration. This has worked great with the exception that all traffic passes through the VPS. The benefit of a mesh network is that I can directly connect clients and data does not have to flow through an intermediary VPS.

I tried a couple but had no luck running them in VMs so I gave up.

Precisely. I made an edit earlier to clear that up.

I'm using a pretty good VPN and I still get ads.

Problem solved. The firewall was attempting to pass traffic through the default gateway. You have to create a firewall rule to allow whatever traffic you want but in the advanced settings you need to select the wireguard gateway instead.

Thanks so much for the detailed reply. I have about 20TB of data on the disks otherwise I would take your advice to set up a different scheme. Luckily, as it's a backup server I don't need maximum speed. I set it up with mergerfs and snapraid because I'm essentially recycling old drives into this machine and that setup works pretty well for my situation.

The proxmox host is the default (ext4/lvm I believe). The drives are also all ext4. I very recently did a data drive upgrade and besides some timestamp discrepancies likely due to rsync, the SCSI semi-virtualized thing wasn't an issue. I replaced the old drive with a larger one, hooked the old one up to a usb dongle and passed it through to OMV and I was able to transfer everything and get my new data drive hooked back into the mergerfs pool and snapraid. I'll do a test and see if I can still access the files directly in the proxmox host just for educational purposes.

I'll try to re-mount the NFS and see where that gets me. I'm also considering switching to a CIFS/SMB share as another commenter had posted. Unless that is susceptible to the same estale issue. I won't be back at that location for about a week so I might not have an update for a little while.

I run a few servers myself with proxmox. FYI there is a script that removes that nag screen as well as configures some other useful things for proxmox self-hosters.

https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/

Have you tried or do you have any knowledge about utilizing the display ports on the gpu while virtualizing either in lieu or in tandem with streaming displays?

Hmm. I’m running a 3090 and 4090. Looks like vgpu is not possible yet for those cards.

That’s pretty decent. I tried speed testing some other recommendations and I was seeing 35 MB/s.

I've tried Nebula before but couldn't get it running properly on all devices. How is Tailscale in terms of compatibility and can you also use wireguard simultaneously? Mesh networks are great for connecting my own devices and servers, but I still need a wireguard interface for certain servers to provide public access through a public router. I also ran into a major issue setting up Nebula on my laptop in which it couldn't be used without disabling my VPN. Is any of that a problem with Tailscale? Also, is Tailscales coordination server self hostable or do you have to use theirs? That seems like a dealbreaker if you’re forced to use a third party coordinator

I tried to set up a nebula network but it seems like it has trouble when your hosts are behind a VPN service. The VPN must block the port or protocol the lighthouse is connecting with and I can't figure out a way to bypass the VPN (at least on Mac split tunneling isn't supported). I'm assuming you're familiar with mesh networks...do you have any good youtube videos or resources you would recommend? The nice thing about VPN is it's crazy simple to set up and seems to work with all types of system configurations. Nebula was pretty simple but seems like a pain to troubleshoot so far.

Maybe my situation is just unique, but due to my job I'm able to have a single workstation with multiple high VRAM GPUs. I wouldn't be able to justify the cost of buying new GPUs and an entire rig just for gaming or AI image/video. I wouldn't foresee more than 2 VMs using the GPU in high priority at any single time.

When I'm not working this system sits idle or is running renders. Why not utilize the amazing resources I have to serve my other needs?

Underlying system is running Proxmox. From there I have the relevant two VMs: OMV and Proxmox Backup Server. The hard drives are passed into OMV as SCSI drives. I had to add them from shell as the GUI doesn’t give the option. Within OMV I have the drives in a mergerfs pool, with a shared folder via NFS that is then selected as the storage from within the Proxmox Backup Server VM. OMV has another shared folder that is used by a remote duplicati server via SSH(SFTP?), but otherwise OMV has no other shared folders or services. Duplicati/OMV have no errors. PBS/OMV worked for a couple of months before the aforementioned error cropped up.

Also possibly relevant: No other processes or services are setup to access the shared folder used by PBS.

I would suggest trying wireguard first as it’s much less complex to set up. Once you have a handle on that, you might consider moving to a mesh network. I personally would love to use a mesh network, but have not been able to get it configured correctly the few times I’ve tried.

Forwarded mail but it may be two way in the future so it would probably be smart to just go that route from the beninging.