I’ve thought more on this yesterday, and I think my issue is-

I don’t want something that ‘just works’, I want to BUILD something that ‘just works’

The distinction is that I don’t want to buy premade solutions. I want to make them. Not because of the customizability, but because the fun is in the building. Think Lego- hundreds of people build the exact same product in the end, but why are they sold in pieces? Just assemble the damn things and sell them complete (with markup). You think more people wanna buy that?? I’d bet against it.

Hard agree. In fact, I think there’s a market for JUST the guides. It’s true that there’s a TON of guides out there already, from old blogs to YouTube, but the issue is: all of them start or end with: “your use case might differ, so perhaps this solution isn’t for you.” Or “make sure this setup is compatible with your specific hardware”

For example: I want to set up some sort of backup/cloud storage type system. Well there’s about 1400 ways to accomplish that. I can easily just grab one and go, but I’ll always wonder- should I have done this a different way? Would my life be easier/more secure if I chose a different set up?

So offering hardware that is compatible with whatever “stack” of services included would be a huge plus. Sorta like getting a raspberry pi and following a specific raspberry pi tutorial- you know the issues you get aren’t gonna be due to incompatibility.

I think it really boils down to the scale of one’s home lab- are you just tinkering to get some skills and make something cool? Or are you hoping to do something much much bigger? Different software solutions fit those extremes differently.

Sorry, got off rambling there. I guess I’ve been down the home lab hardware/software wormhole for too long these last few weeks.

Yeah, two separate drives. Do you set up bios legacy from the bios menu?

Damn, that would be perfect. I’ll give that a go. Thanks

Interesting… but that just replaces an existing step with another step. I’d like to reduce the overall steps to get to each system. And if I can’t do that, I’d at least like to switch the order to win>EOS>Deb

Perfect. I’m sold.

Thanks

Yeah… the depths of my laziness knows no bounds. But this whole downward spiral of Firefox might be the push I need to get my shit together.

Any reason not to use bitwarden?

I probably need to just take the plunge and start using an actual password manager. Just seems so daunting.

Thanks for the reply.

Can I import all my Firefox saved logins and whatnot on librewolf?

Also: What browser can I use on iOS?

Thanks for this. I guess I should have expected that answer. Bluetooth in general already tests my patience, so I’m not sure a new project revolving around things that already piss me off would be a smart move for my already rising blood pressure.

I’ll stay tuned to that protocol though, as it could probably help me in some other less complicated projects I’d like to tackle.

I’ve never heard of someone doing something like this before, but it sounds like it could have some pretty cool downstream applications (thinking Bluetooth speakers)

With your setup would it be possible to pair your headphones to your phone (iPhone in my case) and be able to pass audio from different computers to a central one that my phone could then relay to my headphones?

I often walk around my house/yard while listening to something playing on my laptop/desktop. And if I get too far from the source, it breaks the Bluetooth connection. So I usually end up having to drag my laptop around the yard with me. A much nicer solution would be to have my phone on my person, and use the wifi to keep connected to my “audio source” without needing proximity to the actual pc playing the sound.

Hahah! This answer works for me, because I was unsure what db0 was. Now I hopefully learn two new acronyms

Yeah… I’m not sure there’s anything more I can do. I’ve added the port forwarding rule to my router. As far as I know, there’s not much else to do.

Oh wow. That is a good tip. Because that could drive someone like me insane. (Un)fortunately— I know there’s an issue. Any traffic I pass through my wg vpn ends up nowhere. So I know the tragic is being redirected, but I can’t tell where or why it doesn’t make it inside my home network.

Either way, I got Tailscale to work right out the rip, so I’m just rocking that until I have more time to tinker with WG.

This is the first time I have attempted to port forward. So there is only one rule: this one. Port 5xxxx:5xxxx to the internal IP with the wg-easy docker container.

Thanks for the reply, but I’ve bailed on this project for now. I fly to Europe tomorrow, so I don’t have any extra time to tinker. I gave Tailscale a try, and it works flawlessly, so I’m not likely to try WireGuard any time soon. I’ll wait for them to try an monetize their “free plan” users.

This comment has been haunting me a bit. I have been struggling with my port forwarding in the rest of this thread, so I decided I need to investigate alternatives. I’ve heard good things about Tailscale, so I started googling. The following quote is directly from the Tailscale web-page: (emphasis mine):

“WireGuard is typically configured using the wg-quick tool. To connect two devices, you install WireGuard on each device, generate keys for each device, and then write a text configuration for each device. The configuration includes information about the device (port to listen on, private IP address, private key) and information about the peer device (public key, endpoint where the peer device can be reached, private IPs associated with the peer device). It’s straightforward, particularly for a VPN. Every pair of devices requires a configuration entry, so the total number of configuration entries grows quadratically in the number of devices if they are fully connected to each other.”

I find it odd that they would say this, if the Wireguard VPN works as you stated. Any tutorial or article regarding wireguard fails to make this discussion obvious, so I am now even a bit more confused. (still won’t solve my port forwarding issue. So I guess I’m stuck with Tailscale anyway…

EDIT: Tried from an external wifi network, same issue. I think it’s my port forwarding is broken/wrong. I can’t see the port being open from outside. Need to do some troubleshooting on that end. Any advice would be welcome.

I will try that today.

For your first question: I went to https://www.portchecktool.com/ and found that the connection is being refused. So I think this is the issue. I will have to dig in a bit more, but I do believe the answer to your 2nd and 3rd question are - yes.

Damn. That sounds perfect. That’s exactly how I was hoping it would work. But for some reason my phone won’t connect… I wonder how to troubleshoot it.

Thanks for the reply. As I said below: when I flip on the wireguard toggle in my phone’s app, it appears as if I am connected, but it seems something is off. I am not seeing the “last handshake on” line, and when I try to navigate to the internet (for example ‘whatismyip’, my browser app times out. So it seems my requests are trying to go through the VPN, but they are getting stuck.