buttmasterflex

There’s one across the street that captures my home. I fantasize about taking it out in a number of creatively destructive methods.

Netbird is a zero trust mesh VPN, very similar to Tailscale. My use would be accessing my Jellyfin and Navidrome servers remotely

Yes, I’m a geologist by education and career. I self-host a few different services but keep them all on my LAN. Setting up Netbird is on my to-do list, but I’m simply not confident enough in the network security aspects to expose anything outside of a VPN tunnel.

Hardware: what you currently have on hand to play around with.

Software: start with something simple and well documented. Not quite the driver for the learning phase, in my personal opinion.

“Utilities” as you call them: What is useful to you? What do you want to play with or need to improve your personal use case?

I don’t mean to be flippant with my answers here. Do a little introspection and determine what is genuinely useful for you to self host. I personally run Technitium, Jellyfin, a portion of the "-arr"s, Immich, and Navidrome. My family uses all of these services/utilities on a daily basis, so they are useful for me to host. I have some of the services that need CPU and GPU processing power running on my gaming PC and others running on a Lenovo ThinkCenter that I got for free from the IT department at work. They have bins of PCs slated for recycling that work perfectly fine but are “outdated”.