wltr

If you don’t setup or activate exit node, no traffic is routed through any of your nodes. All you have is the access to the nodes. Which is what you need. I tested exit nodes only recently, they’re very easy to setup as well, but I found no practical need for my use case.

I think installing and logging in should be trivial remotely. Like hey mum, install this app, and log in (trivial with Google or Apple accounts). The rest is on you. Just test the waters yourself first, you’ll get the idea, it’s pretty straightforward. Even if it’s not what you’re looking for, you’d have more information and skills to move to the next thing.

I’d suggest you to investigate either Tailscale or similar solutions. I’m using Tailscale, and it’s really easy to set up. It can automatically connect to the VPN when you access their resource, and the internet works as well. So technically, they can be connected all the time. That’s much safer than the alternative of just opening a port, and dealing with things like CGNAT.

The alternatives to Tailscale I know about are Headscale (which you need self-hosting), Netbird, WireGuard. At least, but there are more.

And search for tunnels as well. You could utilise Cloudflare Tunnel, but I wouldn’t go that way.

I’d suggest testing waters with Tailscale as it’s the easiest, and tweak from there. They have a YouTube channel which helps at starting, I found it just recently. (I use them for a year or two now.)

While I have no respect for Windows people, it’s interesting to read through their failures. Yeah, do Windows instead of spending bits of your time to make an effort at learning something new.

I mean it, in a non-sarcastic way. You can start with Windows, and if you won’t give up on this hobby, I bet you’d come to some open source system instead at some point. After all, the entire self-hosting point is not in ditching Windows, but ditching proprietary thing corporations lure people to use, to farm their data and money too. And attention, not the least thing. It’s just that Windows is precisely the very thing a self-hoster would despise.

Having one to boot into ‘launch that game’ mode makes sense to some, but running it to run some services 24/7, makes little sense, if at all.

Do you mind elaborating more on the topic? I see them stressing that the licence is AGPL and it didn’t change. Is there anything else that is not obvious from the first glance?

Thanks a lot! I’d explore that. I don’t know about others here, but I’m not even considering a non-self-hosted solution. But it’s great to know upfront that it would require a powerful server to have languages other than English.

Does anyone have any notes on how to self host it and ideally some feedback on what it is to self-host it?