I’m in the means of buying a mini pc for selfhosting stuff. My main reasons are sailing the high seas for movies and series and hosting my families photos, videos to escape gdrive. I’m thinking about some kind of DMS / digitalizing paperwork and mail in the future.
I casually look into all kinds of software that could do the task and now I’m a bit overwhelmed. Is owncloud or an alternative enough, or do I need something more elaborated like TrueNAS? But all the NAS Foss stuff seems to run on their own OS. Can my Pirate Ship run on that? I feel like the diversity of solutions is making this very opaque for me.
If this is the goal, then you need to concern yourself with your network first and the computer/server second. You need as much operational control over your home network as you can manage, you need to put this traffic in a separate tunnel from all of your normal network traffic and have it pop up on the public network from a different location. You need to own the modem that links you to your provider’s network, and the router that is the entry/exit point for your network. You need to segregate the thing doing the sailing on its own network segment that doesn’t have direct access to any of your other devices. You can not use the combo modem/router gateway device provided by your ISP. You need to plan your internal network intentionally and understand how, when, and why each device transmits on the network. You should understand your firewall configuration (on your network boundary, not on your PC). You should also get PiHole up and running and start dropping unwanted inbound and outbound traffic.
OpSec first.
Well, thats a lot to concern, and some points, I can probably not check in the nearer future (like the router beeing my own and not my ISPs. I am bound to the Router by contract. But I will keep that in mind. This made my “look into” list a lot longer :D