I have tested both lingding and linkwarden. Lingding was easy to use and did the basics in bookmark management. Though I settled on linkwarden for its saving of webpages in different formats with folder and subfolder organisation in the UI.

Both are good options, but linkwarden seem to be more power user focused.

I would find this interesting and useful as well, especially as one of the things holding me back from ditching chrome all together is all my bookmarks.

Would love to somehow import them all into linkwarden to have a centralized bookmark location.

Seems like the N100 is your option if you are only choosing between these two. Personally I am in the same both as others here, where desktop hardware is my preference at the moment especially if I can find combo deals for mombo/cpu.

Though my recommendation is to consider a board that would support PCIe for a potential LSI HBA card, stay away from any other sata expansion cards unless you don’t value your data.

If you do ever pick up a LSI HBA card with support for either 8/12/24 drives I would also state to plug the whole pool into this card and not mix and match between onboard SATA connections and the card.

A boot drive can still connect to a SATA connection on the board as it not part of the pool.

I’m running my NAS on a 12 year old motherboard with 16gb of ram the max the board supports. Though I wish I could bump this up now after running this system for 9 years.

I would recommend having a board with at least a PCIe slot so if you ever need more drives you can plug them all into a HBA Card. My board has 3 and I use 2 of them at the moment. One for the HBA card that supports 24 drives and another for a 10gb NIC.

The third I would probably use to add another HBA card if I expand drive quantities.

You have an excellent point, it seems like tailscale would have a larger attack surface.

I wonder if credentials are hashed in some way on tailscale servers, so even with an attacker gaining access to their servers it would essentially be useless to them.

Tailscale would be the most “secure” as you have no ports open and only you can access it. Keep in mind your services will only be accessible by you along as all your devices connect to your tailscale instance. Sharing access is possible but will require some explanation.

Wireguard is another option, just as secure as the first option, it will need one port open but the port only responds if you are connecting with proper keys/authentication. Like tailscale you can only access your services if connected to your wireguard instance.

Reverse Proxy, any version you choose will work, it depends on your preference of layout and user interface. Nginx proxy manager, haproxy, traefik. Each accomplish the same with different levels of setup, I listed them in my ease of use. If you use pfsense as your router haproxy installation is easy and there are plenty of guides about setup. Nginx proxy manager you can also find a bunch of setup videos where it’s running on home assistant.

With a reverse proxy you will open port 443 and in your firewall rules point it at your reverse proxy. Your proxy will then direct traffic to any one of your services. You will need a domain name so you can access service1.mydomain.com or service2.mydomain.com from anywhere on the web.

With a reverse proxy and any public website I recommend to run them behind a ddns like CloudFlare. You can do this for free and it helps protect your services against DDoS, bots/crawlers, and it obscures your HomeLab IP, as all incoming traffic goes through CloudFlare and then get directed to your HomeLab.

Additional security that can be implemented within your firewall is to block all traffic not originating from your country, or even only allow specific IP addresses.

I use a combination of all this above where a few services run publicly accessible, and everything else is accessed through tailscale or wireguard. Internally I run haproxy on pfsense where public service are proxied.

I also run nginx proxy manager for my local services, this allows me to access my local services such as service1.local.mydomain.com with a full SSL certificate. So once I connect to my home network with tailscale/wireguard I can type in these domain names into my browser. At some point I will move these into haproxy with its own frontend for internal services.

IMO, the hardware can be easily swapped as needed and upgraded where need.

For the OS its a little “easier” to use and providers a little more “flexibility” as you have more choices in what to install. There are some great videos on YouTube that I recommend to get you started. Have a look at spaceinvaders videos for pretty much everything if you go this route.

If I was you I would go with a custom build. You will need a PC case, a motherboard, some ram, plug in your HDDs and SSDs, maybe throw in a Nvidia graphics card for transcoding.

On the OS side I would recommend to look into something like unraid, it would allow you to run the arrs in docker.

This is a pretty solid approach and definitely out of the box thinking. Going to give this a shot for sure, I especially like that your approach is searchable and cached like you said.

In the same boat as you here. Tried both and went back to Pi-hole because “why not?”

Adguard does have homeassistant setup which was nice and easy, but I like to compartmentaliz my setup so if homeassistant goes offline my internet does not go out when adguard is down.

Since I started running pfsense on a custom PC with dedicated NIC, unbound has been my go to choice now for DNS and Adblock. I use Pi-hole on specific subnets now.