Hi, first congrats for going the way of homelabing.

Like you first the hardware :

The elitedesk are great lines of prebuilt PCs mainly for little home servers BUT I wouldn’t recommend to you to take the mini version as it’s very very tiny and therefore doesn’t have great modularity nor upgradeability.

You don’t need to take massive servers or towers but the SFF versions of these or the normal version (starting to get big) are way better and will permit to you to have more space to tweak it and more generally have some place to put storage or else.

But if you can’t allow yourself to have at least a tiny bit bigger that’s okay and you can stay with the mini version that’s not a dummy choice.

For the storage depending on what you’re going to run in 5 years, 120GB could be not enough, adding the backups, you should consider buying at least 256 to 512GB of ssd (preferable for system (SATA or NVME whatsoever)). When it comes to raw and dummy storage, use hard drive, old schooled at first glance they are dirt cheap when getting them on discount. For storing only some videos, photos and music, 2TB usable is nice and making it mirrored (RAID 1) is nice too. But maybe (if one day comes the idea off having larger sizes) using RAID 5 could be nice as you could expend storage easily, you cannot really adapt RAID 1 to RAID 5 without manually doing backups and restoring them.

So buy some hard disks, if you want, you can buy them used (around 15-20 bucks for 2TB good used hard drive). Or you can buy them refurbished or new as you wish. When it comes to network storage hard disks are the best as you basically can’t max out basic NVME drives with your network, basic ones are at around 3000MiB/s so that means 24,000Mib/s of bandwidth so you would need a 25G network (thing that I think you don’t have).

And using more reasonable sized PCs are going to help you fitting all your drives, and maybe putting external NICs in there.

Secondly the software.

Using docker to easily selfhost is a great idea but I really don’t like portainer and mainly the way they manage docker container.

So I would suggest you 2 things if you want to get a bit into tech simply deploy your docker containers with docker compose file, once into you’ll see that it’s very simple.

But if you prefer a simpler approach while not giving up features, as you said you’re a father (congrats), I wouldn’t recommend to you YunoHost it’s a out-of-the-box platform to self host stuff very easily without pretty much technical knowledge.

If the apps are just for you and your wife (pretty close people) using a VPN that give access people to your whole local network (for really close people) or setting up an overlay VPN like tailscale (and selfhost headscale or use netbird) would be nice and pretty straightforward.

If you prefer to make it available online you can also reverse proxy services to make it open to the www from your IP, or use Cloud flare tunnels (don’t like the idea of having cloudflare snipping out all my traffic) or you can use a vps to do the kinda same thing as with cloudflare tunnels without having them on your shoulders.

That’s it for me, hope I guided you, and feel free to ask questions if you wish. Great homelabing journey to you! :)

Gonna modify it a bit as sure it’s not that true

I am wrong but you need to use usenet providers to download stuff right? So it’s centralized and company based?

Maybe I’m a bit old school but is this process not against the spirit of piracy,

be generous to share
fight against censorship and DCMA takedown
work in a decentralized way

But what’s your opinion about it, because don’t you think it’s opposed from the original torrenting piracy spirit?

In the way of piracy (maybe I missed it but Usenet piracy is new for me)

I think that the Tor network is proven to be broken by feds if you are suspicious.

The Tor network was in fact used to reveal the identity of someone (https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/german-authorities-apparently-cracked-tor-anonymity-but-onion-heads-say-its-still-safe) but as we don’t know the truth we cannot really make conclusion but we can act that :

(Tor is always more secure if you’re opsec is great from the beginning)

For example you’re one of the biggest drug dealer and you’re doing 100 000 of deaths every say, for sure they will cramp up to you and find you, succeeding to deanonymize you.

But most of the time you are not that attractive so you will be mostly anonymous. They can target an entity to reveal it but cannot deanonynize the entire network

Vivaldi is a no-go for me due to these two reasons:

1- Chromium based 2- Does not respect the “open-source spirit”

Just the old .ssh/config file, works like a charm on all terminals :)

It’s rare for laptop to come with hardware switches for microphones but some of them are built with camera switches

Have seen a Dell Latitude 5400 (I think) with an hardware camera cover

In our scenario we are thinking about someone trying to sneak on you. But a jack mic cut off is not removing the internal microphone just putting the source to a different one. So if this person has access to your PC he coule surely access other sensors than the cut off jack

Thank you gonna check it

Good idea for normal people that are not really knowing how and what to put on such a device

In theory this is great, but in reality this will be used very badly by big corporates and all of this shit world

Oh sorry didn’t go very deep

Where did you found that SimpleX was for profit?

Based around a company

Wouldn’t really recommend threema and would include SimpleX

Said *without docker

Basically wants to setup SearXNG without using docker but wants to understand how apache serves it