If you’re behind a CG NAT (carrier grade NAT), you’ll be doubly in trouble as it will be essentially impossible to get a forwarded port since your “IP” is essentially a LAN address within your ISP’s CG NAT, if that makes sense.

Hey it’s a group chat with my grandma ಠ_ಠ

Nice! Just shared this (as a PDF without the domain name lol) with my family!

I’m an idiot and never linked the link

https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/authentik-docker-compose-guide-2025/

1. I got started with a guide from these guys back in 2020. I still use traefik as my reverse proxy and Authelia for authentication and it has worked great all this time. As someone else said, everything is in containers on the one host and it is super easy this way. It all runs on a single box using containers for separation. I should probably look into a secondary server as a live backup, but that’s a lot of work / expense. I have a Cloudflare dynamic DNS container running for that.
2. I would definitely advocate for owning your own domain, for the added use case of owning your own email addresses. I can now switch email providers and don’t have to worry about losing anything. This would also lean towards a more memorable domain, or at least a second domain that is memorable. Stay away from the country TLDs or “cute” generic TLDs and stay with a tried and true .com or .net (which may take some searching).
3. I don’t bother with this, I just run my server behind Cloudflare, and let them protect my server. Some might disagree, but it’s easy for me and I like that.
4. Containers, containers, containers! Probably Docker since it’s easy, but Podman if you really want to get fancy / extra secure. Also, make sure you have a git repo for your compose files, and a solid backup strategy from the start (so much easier than going back and doing it later). I use Backblaze for my backups and it’s $2/month for some peace of mind.
5. Do it!!!

Illinois at least passed a law to limit the consent given when using a digital ID with a police officer such that they’re ONLY allowed to use it for ID and not snooping, but that’s the only state to do so.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/should-i-use-my-states-digital-drivers-license

It doesn’t help our friends in the EU, but I’m hopeful that the CFPB’s “Open Banking” rules might actually make it possible to do this with an open source product with OAuth and common APIs rather than these aggregators that are just web scraping your bank.

I’ve heard others recommend Low End Box before but I have no experience, so do some due diligence before selecting any of these!

https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month/

I started with the 2020 tutorial from these guys. They’ve updated it a few times through the years so I can’t speak to how good the new version is, but I’m sure it’s probably plenty to get started.

https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/traefik-v3-docker-compose-guide-2024/

After I followed this guide, I’ve deviated significantly as I learned and started to do my own thing. It’s a great place to start and learn the basics of containerized applications and once you have that then you can host most things that are dockerized. All I need to do now to start up a new service is pull up the README on Docker Hub (or better yet, if LinuxServer.io has a container that does what I want to do, on their website), figure out what I want to do with the variables and any setup that needs to happen, and then I add it to my .yml and start it up!

I’ve got it all tracked now on GitHub so I can see what I’ve changed and when and if something were to go wrong I could revert back to a known-good configuration.

Vaultwarden is only the server, no? So any clients that you use to access Vaultwarden are built and maintained by 8bit solutions a.k.a. Bitwarden, including the desktop client that is the subject of this post.

De-Googling was what got me started as well. Wanted to be able to have my own Google Drive clone with Nextcloud. From there it was just one little improvement / additional service at a time as I learned to use Linux and docker. Now I run a Linux laptop and am considering an android phone.

Engineering background for reference.

It’s $10 per year

It was just always so annoying having to go into the iPhone keyboard punctuation twice for each domain

Man, some people have really thought of everything. I am so impressed.

Honestly, I learned a ton from these guys: https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/

I’ve diverged a good bit since then of the services I’ve added and the specifics of how I configure things (I still use Traefik whereas I think they’ve shifted to Nginx), but they have a great example of a GitHub repo and what it looks like to manage a self-hosted server.

For #2 and #3, it’s probably exceedingly obvious, but wish I would have truly understood ssh, remote VS Code, and enough git to put my configs on a git server.

So much easier to manage things now that I’m not trying to edit docker compose files with nano and hoping and praying I find the issue when I mess something up.

And it is wife / parent / grandparent approved in my household!

It’s good enough that once I taught my mom to use it, she then went and taught my grandma and now we’ve got the whole fam on a family plan. It’s seriously so good.

This feels a lot like the argument of well what if they break TLS? A lot of hypotheticals when I don’t have any reason or proof to believe that they’ve made a back door

I was able to install Linux on my 2015 MBP, but weird stuff didn’t work OOTB like the webcam and while I eventually got it working, it was less than polished because it was all reverse engineered workarounds by the Linux gods who managed to figure out the exact commands that were needed to be run.

Also the hardware support is not great, for example the webcam. I installed Linux on my old MBP but it was a hassle to get the webcam working involving some dubious command line entries with sudo