Self-Hosted

Your NAS, your Docker containers, your VMs: none of it needs to touch the internet. Ever. That’s the first reason to run a WireGuard tunnel back into your house. Not privacy, just never opening a port publicly in the first place. WireGuard is the one door in, and once you’re through it, everything behaves like you’re on the LAN, because you are. The second reason is the one people actually think of when they hear “VPN”: tunneling home while you’re on somebody else’s network, hotel wifi, a coffee shop, your phone’s hotspot. Commercial VPNs solve that by routing you through their own servers, meaning you trust their business model instead of your own network. Point WireGuard at home instead and your traffic exits from your house. Looks like you’re at home, because you basically are. ...

Note: These are notes from my own setup, not a definitive reference. I wrote them down as I went so I’d have something to follow if I ever have to rebuild this from scratch, not as verified documentation. Kopia’s flags and behavior may have moved on since I wrote this. If something doesn’t match what you see, check Kopia’s own docs for the current version. Kopia is an open-source, encrypted, deduplicating backup tool, the kind of thing you run instead of paying for Backblaze’s app or piecing together rsync and a prayer. It has a client-server mode: a repository server holds the actual backup data, and KopiaUI runs on your desktop as a client that connects to it. ...

Note: This guide was written in 2015 for OpenVPN Access Server 2.0.24 on Ubuntu 14. The general process remains similar on newer versions, but package names, download URLs, and some commands will differ. Check the OpenVPN Access Server docs for current instructions. In this guide we’ll install OpenVPN Access Server onto a VPS and connect to it using the built-in client web portal. Step 1: Get a VPS You’ll need a VPS with full root access. For this guide we’re using a 512MB VPS running Ubuntu 14 64-bit. If you use a different OS, the installation commands in Step 3 will differ. ...

Note: This guide is from 2014. VPS pricing has moved since, and the linked Transmission installer script may no longer be maintained, review it before running it (as the guide already tells you to) or look for a current alternative. The general approach, a small VPS running Transmission behind a web UI, still works fine. In this guide we’ll set up a seedbox (a BitTorrent client running on a remote server) on a Linux VPS in four steps. Once it’s running, you can queue downloads from any browser and pull completed files down to your local machine when ready. ...