Their procurement policy is basically “has it been recommended? Is anyone else using it? Is it cheap?”

I work in public sector.

Market to tax funded institutions. If you can market “self hosted” as cheaper and easier than mother solutions you’ll have guaranteed clients for a long time.

I’m using a western digital refurb HDD. 14TB.

running 24/7 pretty much since the pandemic. It’s basically my media server.

Sucuri?

Akamai?

Kinda depends on what’s going on, price point, etc. is this for DDOS purposes?

You do not need a CDN, but you have users. So, is this for like, a Plex server, serving friends in a similar geographic region?

What’s the use case? That will greatly help us answer.

If price is the deciding factor then just build one.

Get an old i7 for dirt cheap, cram the thing with ram and storage to suit your budget.

Run something lightweight like Ubuntu Server.

If you want dry and boring, do CompTIA and Cisco certs.

If you want fun, get into info sec and learn that way. Check out OWASP, Hackerone, Hack The Box, et al. These platforms will teach you about networking and security at the same time.

Neither is better. Depends on the person.

I recommend getting a VPS and playing around with all kinds of networking tools.

Yeah qbitorrent has this in their settings iirc.

Do ifconfig before VPN, then after. Identify what your VPN connection is (likely TUN0). Then you tell qbitorrent to ONLY use the VPN one.

That way if you suddenly lose VPN service it won’t fall back to your actual IP. (This is how the guy that hacked ubiquity got caught).

I’m no expert, but this sounds like a permissions issue.

Check what permissions your user has on that folder from both connections (local, remote).

My bet is you have a user in your smbconfig that has read permission on a folder that generic users don’t have, and while you can see the folder as a new generic user, you cannot see its contents.

I think this because I have run into similar problems when trying to sync my media to a backup drive. Backup drive was all like “yup, got all the folders. Shame they’re empty! So weird” no compy, there’s 8tb in those folder let’s try again…

As I said In no expert, very possible Im completely off base. Good luck!

Edit: I know you said you triple checked. But for my story, my machine had permission, but my new backup drive did not. So, I’d quadruple check. Like, try temporarily removing all permissions and see if it works. If it does, you know it was permission based.

You can rent super powerful GPUs by the minute via cloud infrastructure. It’s probably the most viable way.