Not a perfect solution, but I use NextDNS which has profiles, and can set allowed services and times of day for them, Online Games, Video Streaming etc. This is set in the phone’s DNS setting so works via WiFi or cellular.

I’ve started to use the excellent DNS Toggle on my phone to quickly enable/disable it for the really annoying sites that block ad blockers etc.

In terms of app control itself, I still use Family Link begrudgingly as well like you for Android phones. I access it via the web page which thankfully still works so I don’t have to have the Google app installed.

You can try Colota as a way of recording your phone location with its own filtering before it uploads to Reitti/Dawarich

I have my important server stuff (docker and immich etc) duped via syncthing to an old external USB drive attached to my office mac which then has Backblaze Personal Backup running. That backs it all up with no storage limit for £70/year on their 2 year plan.

The only downside is if the drive isn’t connected for a few days, it checks it all again on reconnection.

I have about 4TB of files most of the time.

This way I have 3 copies of my files: 2 local, 1 remote.

EDIT: forgot that I also have 1yr retention on the files so in theory I can grab anything that I deleted up to 1yr ago.

So this has been interesting to me as I’m travelling at the moment and wireguard has been blocked on the guest wifi I’ve been on across the hotels, I’ve had to rely on cellular instead.

I’ve just tried Teleport on my Unifi router and that works. I believe it uses wireguard, and it is taking up to 20secs to connect, but I’m now curious as to what it’s doing to bypass the VPN restrictions that are blocking plain wireguard.

B for me, because it was the first Google image search that came up about 15 years ago for ‘cat 5e wiring’. And that’s probably all there is to explain the result in here.

Shoutout to the guy who also had a video explaining what the little plastic figure of 8s were I got in the pack (to segregate the wires).

Not for me as I’m not an iOS user, but I contribute to all FOSS software I find useful as it helps motivate the developer and why should everything be free? My time sure as hell isn’t.

So a small fee for a well developed product, that offers something handy and keeps getting support is more than acceptable. Also, it sets a barrier to entry for making it good. If you expect users to pay $5/$10 for something that is your hobby, it had better be good.

Good luck with it.

I recommend the Colota app for tracking. I use a mix of Reitti and Dawarich at the moment to log the info (both of which support sharing) as I can’t work out which I prefer.

https://github.com/dietrichmax/colota

https://colota.app/

I use a Pangolin reverse proxy with OIDC (PocketID) for family access to services, along with CrowdSec. For the Immich app access which needs to bypass auth login through the reverse proxy, I use ‘link share’ in Pangolin that gives me header tokens that can be entered in to the Immich app under Advanced settings.

I’ve been an Immich user for over 2 years now, so it’s been a journey for me to implement it to this standard.

Or as someone else suggests, try CloudFlare with something like Google Auth login. Just be aware that you are then exposing all your traffic to Cloudflare. I take that as a small sacrifice for simplicity.

Ah thanks. I know I have scratched the surface with what MA can do, and it is one of the more useful things I self host. Music Assistant and Immich are the absolute must haves.

Thanks for that. Read Pt1 and it all makes sense.

I’ve found that Music Assistant has worked well for group casting audio for me with Google Minis and Chromecast Audios. Although I’ve not had it running all day, but it has removed the hassle of it stopping from WiFi disconnects from my phone.

Always looking for new ways to do things, so will look out for pts 2 & 3.

You can run docker stacks with external IPs, no? I run all mine from Unraid, through Dockhand as compose stacks, with some ports on the host, others as external IPs on VLANs. But yes, like you I would actually like to move them to VMs so it’s easier to backup, and service, without taking the host server offline.

It starts to get like Inception levels of depth on VMs and hosts!

Take from this anything of use to you: I syncthing my important Unraid server stuff to a MacBook running Backblaze with a 14TB external drive. DNS is handled by NextDNS in the cloud anyway, so it’s just Immich and other random family oriented services for me. I use Pangolin for exposed services.

You could use syncthing (or Resilio) over a tailscale or headscale network or whateveritispeopleuse to a remote PC.

My Docker compose files and VMs are backed up once a week via plugins on Unraid, which of course get duped via syncthing to the MacBook.

I did try a Hetzner Storage Box for a while to replace Backblaze, but the hassle of having to keep an eye on the syncing was a pain and I fell back in to Backblaze on the MacBook as it’s a set and forget (as long as they don’t change the filetypes ignored…). I may go back to a Storage Box again.

I do also want to look into redundancy with a spare server though so it becomes quicker/easier to get it all up and running in event of failure. This is where selfhosting starts getting serious!

Just chucking this out there to help with the fediverse.