Have you tried a non-tech solution, like putting the drives into some noise absorbing materials, or isolating the sound with the hard case, things like that? That may sound not really obvious, but my guess is that you can at least get some noise off with a solution like this.

I won’t go with SSDs for a NAS as it’s very expensive. But if money of no concern, that Beelink thing looks impressive.

Did anyone try CLI clients, like (neo)mutt for that? I expect it can be set up on a server (if we consider self-hosting) and do this job automatically. While all the AI thingy feels like magic, my practical experience shows that there are just some keywords or even just the sender, with which mails can be sorted.

I do agree with you, entirely. My point is, it was the easiest option. I guess self-hosting Headscale should eliminate that, if there’s nothing suspicious with the clients.

Also, I tried Netbird, and it was good, but a bit more complicated. I didn’t like it UX wise, but that could be me not having enough time to explore. I have it installed with my mum’s PC at her home. My infrastructure uses Tailscale now.

Also, there are other alternatives. I haven’t tried them yet. All I wanted to say, there are compromises everywhere, and dealing with the US is the compromise for now.

I’m located in Ukraine, so personally, I wish them what they want to push on me — this administration wants me and my family to die for the orange monkey to steal some more money for himself, betraying his own country; I guess that’s obvious for all of us.

But I just think for me personally that’s rather a vector of my movement rather than changing things momentarily. So, to me, Tailscale was a god send. As I struggled to get through this. Now I understand it a bit better. I’d love to setup WireGuard myself, I just lack some knowledge, and also time plus energy. I hope I’d do that this year. We’ll see. Thanks for enhancing my point, and happy new year.

I’d say the same. About money, I’d formulate this differently: most of the people here would be happy to help for free, I believe. And the author could just ‘thank with a coffee’ kind of thing, if they feel like it. I see that’s as a very nice option for everyone.

With the 3rd part, I’d recommend going with Tailscale, it really helps for folks who don’t understand many things yet, and is super easy to setup. The free tier allows 3 users and 100 computers, so even if you need more, it’s easy to start with that, learn things and then change this aspect.

Personally, I have tremendous issues with paper notebooks. I love them for random notes, but not structuring things. I started a blog a year or so ago, and it was very rewarding to document everything there. My blog is not online yet, but I plan to publish it within a month or so. If things are good, maybe the next week even.

I wanted to tell others that if you want any help setting up a simple blog for yourself, you’re welcome to ping me, I can help you with setting that up, and you may see what difference it makes! I so so so wish I had that done years ago, but at least I started already.

Yes! I literally wrote the guy (or gal) the same thing personally, before reading any comments. Keeping a journal helps so so much! Start a blog if you can, I only started it in 2025 (having some random notes here and there before that), and it’s so so so rewarding!

Also, GPTs help a lot, especially when you’re able to verify the outputs. It’s somewhat challenging, to understand it’s lying, if you’re new to the topic, but I noticed it’s quite good at the simple questions, especially tech ones.

I’ve got an impression that rather a friend than a consultant is needed. Unfortunately, I’ve got none when I needed them so much. But I think I can be someone’s friend, so feel free to ping.

I wasn’t able to read all the replies, but I thought I’d like to state that I quite enjoy the community! So many people willing to help, and discuss things. I wish I’d found the community much earlier, when I just started the self-hosting adventure.

Not much from me, but it wasn’t clear to me whether you were successful with WireGuard. I’m not, till today! So I can’t recommend Tailscale more! Others recommend things like Headscale, or others, I plan to migrate to them one day. But so far, Tailscale was really good for me.

I use it on a Raspberry Pi 2B and Orange Pi Zero, both work wonderfully for the task, and it looks like Pi-Hole can work fine even on a router. Both of my SBCs are passively cooled, that’s why I decided to comment on the photo: you don’t need a computer this powerful to run it. As far as I remember, my very first Raspberry Pi (v. 1B or something like that) handled this task very well too. I temporarily retired that SBC in favour of Orange Pi Zero, so I cannot say for sure, but I think that computer had no issues with being fast enough for Pi-Hole. Really, give it a try if you didn’t, it’s ‘install once and forget’ type of software. Perhaps it should be updated periodically, but I don’t manage that. The only nuance with it, you need to have two computers, for the redundancy. Otherwise you’d be having downtimes when you need to turn off the SBC, or even reboot it.