962: The Home Server / Synology Show

Wes and Scott talk about their evolving home-server setups—Synology rigs, Mac minis, Docker vs. VMs, media servers, backups, Cloudflare Tunnels, and the real-world pros and cons of running your own hardware. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 01:35 Why use a home server? 07:29 Apps for home servers 16:23 Home server hardware 18:27 Brought to you by Sentry.io 20:45 VMs vs containers and choosing the right software 25:53 How to expose services to the internet safely 30:38 Securing access to your server Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  Welcome to Syntax. Today, we're talking about our home server setups, what we're running, what we're running on them, why we have them, how much data we got going on, what's going on with that data, and just generally, what's up with running home server stuff? What's a good process for doing that and all kinds of stuff? My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver. With me, as always, is Wes Boss. What's up, Wes?

• 0:22Wes Bos?

  Hey, I'm excited to talk about this. I feel like we did a Synology home server show, what, probably four years ago, and a lot has changed since then. And like, I feel like we're always talking about our home servers, and we're like, we gotta do a whole show, laying it all out, especially, this is going live during the holidays. You got a little bit of time over the holidays. Why not spend installing virtual machines and banging your head against the wall to make stuff work?

• 0:52Scott Tolinski?

  Of course. Yes, why not?

• 0:54Wes Bos?

  All right, so the whole idea with this episode is we're going to first talk about, like, the hardware, why you might even want a home server, do you also use it for backing up? And then, as well as like, what software do you run on it? What kinds of apps are you running on it? Both like handy stuff, as well as like media, you know, Plax or Jellyfin and downloading things. And we'll have to have CJ on at some point, because I know CJ has a pretty crazy downloading setup, which spans many countries. That's pretty cool. And like, also how to expose them to the internet as well, like, how do you get access to these things when you're out and about?

• 1:35Wes Bos?

  So, first one, uses. Why do we use home servers and what is the stack? So, maybe, let's first start with the actual hardware that we're running ourselves. So, I'm running a Synology DS918 Plus. This is several, many years old. I probably have run it for about six years now. I have 16 terabytes in it with a RAID setup that works out to just over 10 terabytes of actual backup space. Over the years, I've upgraded it to 16 gigs of RAM. Even though it says you can't do that, it works just fine. I recently upgraded it to two and a half gig networking with a simple like $20 USB dongle,

• 2:19Wes Bos?

  which is unbelievably has changed how fast transferring things to it. It's obviously like two and a half times faster. It used to be a gig wired. Did you end up doing that too, Scott?

• 2:32Scott Tolinski?

  I did. I did the USB dongle. I dongled it and yeah, big improvement there. Absolutely.

• 2:38Wes Bos?

  That's amazing. It's so anyone who doesn't know, there's a like a Real Tech chip and most like USB to Ethernet adapters use this chip inside of it and you can simply just install this package on your Synology. And that will be the driver for it. And then you simply just plug it in, hook up your Ethernet to it. And then the old ones, you can keep plugged in as well. Should that ever fail or get bumped? And then you just set the 2.5 gig one as the priority and then your networking is good. I fussed around with the like dual, what is it SMB version three allows you to like parallel send. I could not get it working for the life of me.

• 3:19Wes Bos?

  And if I would have known that just spending $25 on this dongle would have two and a half X'd my speed. I should have known that earlier.

• 3:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 3:29Wes Bos?

  But I also, I slapped two 256 gig SSD drives in it. So if you're running applications, there's a read and write that needs to happen and you have like these like actual hard disk drives that need to spin and find the files on the drive and bring them back. And that could be very slow, especially when you're running like apps on them. I specifically noticed it when I'm using like Jellyfin. And you have frequently accessed files like thumbnails and JavaScript files and CSS. All of those things that when you're using an application need to be served up quickly. As well as there's like a write cache as well, where if you're writing data to your SSD,

• 4:15Wes Bos?

  you can write it to an SSD much faster than you can to the hard disk drive. So it'll sort of like ingest it quickly. And then just throw it over to the slower drives as it has time to do so. So that was a big upgrade. And making things feel faster as well as like the whole dashboard feels a lot more snappy since I did that. And then I have it auto mirror to BackBlaze B2. So BackBlaze B2 is just a spot where you can host files or upload files. And I use a app on the Synology called HyperBackup. And what that does is it just basically just constantly is watching folders and uploading the new versions of those files. So that way I have both a Synology local as well as I have

• 4:59Wes Bos?

  a backup in the cloud. And now that I have fast internet at my house and decent internet at the cottage, I have been tempted to do a second Synology at the cottage and then you can mirror them.

• 5:13Scott Tolinski?

  Mirror them, wow.

• 5:14Wes Bos?

  But like, that's a lot of money to spend on hard drives, whereas like, cloud hosting is very cheap.

• 5:21Scott Tolinski?

  So I run a very similar setup to you. Obviously, we have the same Synology that we've had for a long time. I have 16 terabytes also. The big difference for me is that I have two terabytes of cache. So I have a big old cache.

• 5:37Wes Bos?

  Man.

• 5:38Scott Tolinski?

  Running two 1 terabyte cache drives.

• 5:41Wes Bos?

  That's good. So that just hangs on to more stuff for longer.

• 5:44Scott Tolinski?

  Hangs on to more stuff for longer.

• 5:46Wes Bos?

  And I guess you can, when you are transferring stuff to it, that right cache is a lot bigger.

• 5:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, quite a bit bigger. Yeah. So that's pretty much the only difference. I, you know, I've been running out of space on mine because of how much video I upload. Like,

• 5:59Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 5:59Scott Tolinski?

  It's getting absurd. So I've been actually going through and deleting old video project files on mine manually and finding stuff. Even like right now, I just ran, and we'll talk about some of the software running, but I just ran like an indexing on CopyParty on my Synology. And I'm just like going through and seeing like, client projects that I had that had like 20 copies of every image or 40 copies.

• 6:26Wes Bos?

  Yeah, like I have old WordPress projects that are like probably four or five gigs. And I'm like, ah, should I really be spending like, what, eight cents a month to store this?

• 6:35Scott Tolinski?

  Well, that's what I was thinking. I was like, oh, I should get another drive. And then I'm like, you know what? How about I just go through it and actually delete my stuff? Because I don't need more space. I don't need more space. Yeah.

• 6:45Wes Bos?

  What's interesting about the drives is that we're at a spot now where it's almost cheap enough just to slap SSDs in the NAS itself.

• 6:54Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, which I would love.

• 6:55Wes Bos?

  And that would make it both quiet, like you can't put this NAS in like your office or bedroom, it's loud as hell because it's constantly like err, err, err, writing files to it, but and then it's also like slow. So I'm at a point now where I was like, if I built a new one, would I go for like 80 terabytes of like slower hard disk drives? Or would I try to go like eight terabytes and go all in with SSDs?

• 7:21Scott Tolinski?

  Hmm.

• 7:22Wes Bos?

  I want both for not very expensive. That's what I want.

• 7:25Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, right, right.

• 7:27Wes Bos?

  Exactly. Let's talk about like apps that we actually run on our home servers. So like we're talking about Synology here, but this, we'll talk about running a home server on literally anything. Scott runs a Mac Mini. I run Home Assistant for all of my smart home stuff, which I'm a big fan of that. I run Jellyfin for all of my movies and TV shows. I really like that because when we go to the cottage, we have Starlink and it's very slow internet. Well, it's not very slow, but it's relatively slow. So what we'll do is we'll just download stuff at home where the internet is fiber and then we'll be able to stream it to the

• 8:08Wes Bos?

  cottage at a lower bitrate like on demand. And then it's much quicker to be able to to download and watch a show that way versus trying to download it right when you're at the cottage or stream it from some website.

• 8:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, word.

• 8:23Wes Bos?

  I also have Audiobookshelf I recently got, which I find really helpful as well. I paid for Audible for years and years and years and I lost all of my, I was really upset that I like lost all of my things that I had. Paid credits for, they're like all gone. I don't, I don't know if that's normal or not. When you stop paying for Audible, your credits go away and you lose all the books that you paid for over time. But I was kind of cheesed at that because there's a couple of books I wanted to go back and re-listen to. So I got Audiobookshelf to reclaim those books as well as like the kids and stuff. They, they like listen to audiobooks.

• 8:58Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And Audiobookshelf is great for podcasts too. Um, I haven't used it for that, but I know it works well for that.

• 9:05Wes Bos?

  Oh yeah. Uh, the one thing I like, I paid for a Audiobookshelf iOS app, um, because you can download locally. And I, I did that right before I went on a flight without internet and I love that because then I can just listen to them, listen to them constantly. And I'm slowly getting into Prowler, Radar, Sonar, all of those. Um, but I, I don't know. It's, it's a lot of work to, to get into that. So.

• 9:30Scott Tolinski?

  What, what are those Wes?

• 9:32Wes Bos?

  So Prowler is a torrent indexing. Radar and Sonar are, um, like auto-downloaders for TV shows and movies, things like that, music. So they're just like a whole setup to get into it. But if I am like streaming stuff, I'm, I'm just using either Jellyfin and just downloading the torrent directly on, on the, the NAS or I'm just using something called Streamio where you just, you stream it directly from there. And that's pretty sweet. I do occasionally use it for hosting like node applications and whatnot. I was running Coolify as a VM. We'll talk about that in just a second, but it, the, it was not fast enough

• 10:16Wes Bos?

  to host all the applications that I wanted. So I ended up having to pause it. It was eating up all my RAM. So I was like, I need to build, I think what I'm going to do soon is just build a dedicated local server that's not for like NAS and, and media and stuff like that, but simply just for hosting my projects. Because like, I have several, I have several like WordPress projects that I'm still paying for, for hosting. And I was like, I probably, they don't get a lot of traffic. You could throw CloudFlare in front of it for caching. I was like, I should probably just put this on the box in my house and and serve it up from there. Probably save a couple hundred bucks a year by doing that.

• 10:57Wes Bos?

  And then I don't use it for surveillance. I was dipping into that at one point, like running your own surveillance software. But I've been using Unify Protect, which has a hard drive in my house and just records constantly. And I that that app is sick. It's so fast. It's so good. You can scrub through it. It's like so much better. If you've ever fussed with like a a ring or like I still have lots of wise cameras. You have to look at the clips and try scrub around. The Unify Protect stuff is like 4,000 times better.

• 11:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I I haven't gotten into any of that stuff that I I'd be interested in, but I like would require so much work in my house to be able to wire those cameras up and stuff.

• 11:40Wes Bos?

  Getting the the a a bunch of them are like just plug in, you know, their wifi, but the best ones are are PoE.

• 11:48Scott Tolinski?

  I don't even have like good locations though for plugs and stuff, right? Like

• 11:52Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:53Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's a pain. For me, the stuff that I run, I run on my NAS. So I have two home servers, one of which is a Mac Mini that you can maybe see over here that's running all the time and that's connected to the NAS, obviously. But it is also have my NAS, which I run things on. And I've actually been slowly moving most of my things over to the NAS or the Mac Mini. The big problem is, is that I don't have a container management software solution set up yet. So I'm just kind of YOLO running stuff from the term or from Docker like as I go. And then therefore if things are crashing or if I need to restart, I gotta go manually rerun everything.

• 12:35Scott Tolinski?

  On my Synology, I pretty much run Audiobookshelf. We have a lot of audiobooks for for my wife and myself. I run Q BitTorrent on there. That app sucks, but it's like the most reliable one. And I do have Praalar Radar Sonar. Is it Praalar?

• 12:54Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I have those installed and running, but I do I couldn't tell you if I've ever opened them up. Maybe I think I probably have at some point.

• 13:02Wes Bos?

  Yeah, we're at we're at this weird spot where like I was like Really into piracy for many years as a kid, but like the streaming services got so good.

• 13:11Scott Tolinski?

  What are you talking about piracy?

• 13:12Wes Bos?

  It stopped. Well, for Linux ISO, sorry, not piracy. Downloading Linux ISOs, there you could stream them very easily. So for like many years, I just didn't fuss with any of this stuff because it was just way easier to pay for three or four apps a month. But it's starting to get like, it's obnoxious or we pay for like Apple TV and Netflix and Prime. Like we pay for like four or five and often I can't get the stuff I want, which is so frustrating. So if that's the case, then I, I find it on a Linux website.

• 13:46Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, possibly. You know, I, I then pretty much run everything else on my Mac mini. For like media streaming, the problem I was having was like trying to do transcoding of like really large Blu-ray discs that I ripped from my own personal Blu-ray collection. Trying to transcode those on the fly on my Synology would just crap out in any of them, whether that was Jellyfin, Plex or MB. And then you know what? After dealing with Jellyfin and dealing with MB and trying to then get the bootleg install for the app on my Samsung TV for the Jellyfin, I was just like, you know what?

• 14:28Scott Tolinski?

  Going back to Plex and I installed Plex on my Mac mini and it transcodes everything and it works. It works great. I don't fuss it. The app on the TV is actually very, very good. And everything just works and I'm very happy with that setup. So. The only thing I haven't really done is configured it to run outside of my network. We're pretty much just using an internal.

• 14:52Wes Bos?

  We'll talk about that. I got a solution for you.

• 14:55Scott Tolinski?

  Well, I have, I have solutions for other things. I actually run quite a bit on my stuff outside of the network. One of those things is a Minecraft server. So one of the things I run on my Mac mini is a Minecraft server for my, my son and his friends to all join on. And it's actually cool. Minecraft has got like. Really interesting like hacking scene, obviously, but like there's the Bedrock version and the Java version. The Bedrock is the one that installs on like the Nintendo Switch or iPads. And then there's the Java version, which is like a completely, it's a different game to some extent, even though it's the same game. And somebody wrote like a translation layer between the two. So I'm running a translation layer. So now you can join on Switch or you can join on this.

• 15:36Scott Tolinski?

  And I have, you know, being able to configure and, and update and I'm now managing a Minecraft server for a bunch of, second graders, third graders, he's in third grade now, crazy. Yeah.

• 15:47Wes Bos?

  That Minecraft stuff is super interesting to me. I need to try it out because every now and then I run upon like a, somebody trying to port Minecraft server to Rust. Or, you know, trying to port it to go and like, that seems like a rabbit hole to go down. But it seems like a interesting compute problem. Apparently the like Java version was just an absolute nightmare. So it's not written very well.

• 16:11Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I think that since changed over time with the amount of money that is coming in and out of Minecraft. But yeah, no, it's actually, it's a lot of fun, a lot of fun to run that server, so.

• 16:23Wes Bos?

  Let's talk about actual hardware. So we, we talked about like what we're running, but what are your options as well? So you're thinking about running a home server. What do you possibly need, right? You, you need some actual physical hardware, which could be an old PC, could be an old MacBook, could be an old rack server. You can run Linux on these. You, you don't necessarily have to worry about what OS is, is running on these things, right? Like obviously a lot of them are like just custom Linux distros, but you can, you can run Mac OS, you can run Windows and a lot of the stuff. As long as you have the ability to run VMs, they will run very well on these. The one thing I do want to say here is that like be careful with older tech. So.

• 17:07Wes Bos?

  Like right beside me here, I have a 2009 Mac Pro. Like beefy, awesome like computer, still pretty good. I can install the latest OS on it. You can upgrade the graphics card. And I was like, working on it a couple of months ago. And then I was like, you know what? This is probably too expensive to run. Because these old Macs, especially a lot of them that have Intel chips in them.

• 17:32Scott Tolinski?

  Draw a lot of power.

• 17:33Wes Bos?

  They use a ton of energy, right? And like, I looked it up. This Mac Pro at like a normal load, you know, not idle, but not like full, fully kicked out. It's 250 watts, which is about at, at Ontario electricity prices, which is, electricity is very cheap in, in Ontario, because we have a huge ass waterfall. Is about 90 cents a day, right?

• 17:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 17:57Wes Bos?

  And if you, Scott's Mac Mini uses at medium, not at idle, uses seven watts, right? Think about that, like 250 versus seven. And at a normal load, it uses about 20, 24 watts. So that's 10 times less energy. So at my cheap Ontario prices, that's about 300 bucks a year. And like, what's, what's a Mac Mini cost? Like six, 700 bucks?

• 18:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Wes Bos?

  Even less if you get the, the one.

• 18:26Scott Tolinski?

  Refurbished. And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry. At sentry.io forward slash syntax. You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.io forward slash syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right.

• 18:52Wes Bos?

  It makes sense. The math maths, folks. Go out and buy yourself a Mac Mini if you're looking to do a home server, because you run that thing, like you have to run these things constantly. And it's, it uses quite a bit of energy. Even I did the math on my Synology one at one point, and it was over 150 bucks a year to keep it going, which is, you can pay for a lot of cloud storage or, or arm processing for that.

• 19:18Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, no, absolutely. Huh. Glad you did the math on that. I uh, don't have the patience for that.

• 19:24Wes Bos?

  Do you know that that's my pet peeve with people is that they don't do the math? So often, like, we have an electric vehicle. And so often you come across posts being like, costs so much to to do it. Or like, have you noticed it in your electrical bill? Or like, that's how everyone gauges whether the electric. And it's like, you don't need to notice it in your bill. Literally do the math. You can figure out how much you pay per kilowatt hour. You could figure out how much these things consume, how many kilowatt hours they are using. And then you can multiply those things and figure out how much it costs to maintain. These are not unknowns. You don't need to hear from somebody that something is very expensive to run. You can literally figure it out.

• 20:07Scott Tolinski?

  That's shocking. That's I think it's gonna blow people's brains.

• 20:11Wes Bos?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna, that's the hell I'm gonna die on is people not doing the math on simple things like that.

• 20:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 20:17Wes Bos?

  The same with like leaving lights on. I leave lights on all the time. I don't give a I did the math. It's not a lot.

• 20:22Scott Tolinski?

  LEDs, yeah.

• 20:23Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 20:23Scott Tolinski?

  LEDs, this isn't incandescent bulb territory anymore.

• 20:26Wes Bos?

  No.

• 20:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 20:27Wes Bos?

  No, that's, that's true. You don't need, obviously I turn them off at night. But like, I'm not one of those people being like, if you leave a room, turn the lights off.

• 20:35Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 20:35Wes Bos?

  It doesn't, it doesn't matter.

• 20:36Scott Tolinski?

  For us either. Yeah, I agree. I'm with you on that one. Yeah, that's never been, never been something I've been concerned with since we got these fast bulbs.

• 20:45Wes Bos?

  Software, um, you need some sort of software to manage either or both of virtual machines and containers. So let's talk about the difference between those two. So a VM is like running an entire computer, virtual computer on your machine, right? It has its own hard drive system, you know, virtual hard drive system. It has its own networking. It has all of that stuff. Whereas a container is running on your host machine. A container is like Docker, that's the most popular one, right? It's running on your host machine, so it's running on your laptop or whatever. But it's, it's, has a limited container access to things that are outside of it. So you still have to install things to that container.

• 21:27Wes Bos?

  And you still have to do that, but you're exposing things like like folders and ports and networking from the host machine to the actual container. So a VM is going to be more powerful, but more resource intensive. So in my case, I was trying to run Coolify as a VM, and I was running several other VMs as well, and it was becoming a bit too much. Whereas like I can run lots and lots of Docker machines on my Synology, no problem, because those are a lot less resource intensive. What would you use a VM for? The ones that I'm using, so like Home Assistant OS. So many of the plugins in Home Assistant are themselves Docker containers.

• 22:09Wes Bos?

  So you can't Docker inside of a Docker. So you need something that's going to supervise and orchestrate all of these Docker containers, and it needs to be at a higher level. Same with like Coolify. Coolify is just, you can install it to Linux, right? But you can install it as a VM. So I installed like a a bunch too or something VM. I ran it like that, and then I installed Coolify on there. And then Coolify, for those who don't know, is a self-hosted, kind of like run-your-own Vercel. You can deploy multiple applications to it. You can have grids of many machines. You can spin them up. You have a networking layer.

• 22:48Scott Tolinski?

  I love Coolify.

• 22:49Wes Bos?

  Coolify is fantastic. So if you want to like run like a node, you want to run like a node app and have them build and get integration and all that stuff, but you want to self-host it. Not necessarily just like at your house. If you want to run it on like some servers like on Hetzner or something like that, you can do that with Coolify. And you can install Coolify as a VM, or you can install Linux as a VM, install Coolify on that.

• 23:16Scott Tolinski?

  And then containers, just simply a Docker container, right? I mean, and so many things run inside of containers from pretty much any of these apps. But if you have something like Synology, there's container management built in. Do you do anything specifically for container management? Like, I've been looking into some systems like, here's a Mac app called OrbStack that is supposed to be like a nice one. I've heard of all these different systems, but I don't run anything for managing containers.

• 23:46Wes Bos?

  On Synology, there's a Docker app, and I just use the GUI. So you log in and you click. Click go on the thing. You map your folders, you map your ports. And then if the thing reboots, it will automatically restart your containers from their last state, or it will just boot them fresh, depending on what settings you have. So that's all I have on there. And then on the Synology as well, they have a whole like virtual machine. So similar to if you've ever used like VirtualBox on the Mac, or you can install Linux ISOs and whatnot. So as a VM, I'm running, I was running Coolify and Home Assistant OS, and then all of the other apps that I was running were running as Docker containers.

• 24:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, same. Yeah. And for me, even for me, for Home Assistant, I have it on a little Raspberry Pi, just on its own thing.

• 24:35Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah. So it's not even virtual. It's literally its own hardware.

• 24:39Scott Tolinski?

  Right.

• 24:39Wes Bos?

  So other options, if you've got a piece of hardware and you want to run it on there, you don't want to run, like obviously you can run Mac, Linux, Windows, plus Docker and VirtualBox or some other VM software. But Proxmox is a really popular one. Unraid, Hex OS is another interesting one that seems to be coming up. There's a lot of these like home server OSs that you can sort of take a look at. Some of them are more towards the NAS side of things. Like Synology is a NAS with the ability to run apps on it. And then a lot of these other ones are, they're not a NAS at all. They're just simply a home server that you can run apps on. And it does a lot of nice stuff for you. There's like a GUI, you can log in, you know,

• 25:23Wes Bos?

  you're not in the terminal with all of this stuff. As much as I am a terminal head, I like being able to just log into a GUI and click the buttons when I need to.

• 25:33Scott Tolinski?

  I kind of need that, or want that in my, in my life. There's so, there's such a massive YouTube community of people sharing these tools that I, it's like too overwhelming for me when I look into it. And there's just like this, and then this, and then this, and then this, and then this. And I'm just going, I don't know what to pick. Just, I want something easy. Yeah.

• 25:53Wes Bos?

  Let's talk about exposing it to the internet. So you run all these applications, but you want access to them when you're out of the house. But you also don't want random people having access to your applications if there's no auth. So what's your move for that, Scott?

• 26:08Scott Tolinski?

  My move is CloudFlare tunnels pretty much exclusively. So I have on my Synology, I have CloudFlare running as a container. And then I use tunnels pretty much for everything, which ends up being really nice and easy. Because if you have that CloudFlare installed, you have it installed on your computer and it's running, you're really just saying, point this IP to this domain. You can put it behind a username and password if you want to have another layer of protection in front of it. So a little CloudFlare window will pop up and make you sign in before you can have access to that resource. But CloudFlare tunnels are great because the alternative would be for you to go into your router and say,

• 26:51Scott Tolinski?

  "All right, this port is going to be open to the internet with my IP." And I personally am not enough of a security person to really want to manage that or think about the consequences of that.

• 27:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah, forwarding ports is not the move.

• 27:10Scott Tolinski?

  Forwarding ports is not the move. So for me, just being able to establish that tunnel and make it nice and easy, static IPs for the stuff that I'm going to be connecting, and then that's it, is great. A big fan of that.

• 27:24Wes Bos?

  Yeah, so I am also using CloudFlare tunnel. So I run CloudFlare D. That's the daemon that runs on your computer and will proxy traffic from a domain name. So I have a domain name that every single app is a subdomain. So I have like synology dot whatever dot com, photos dot whatever dot com. And by running that, a lot of these things like Home Assistant, whatever, they will give you the ability to install a plugin that is CloudFlare tunnels. But I run it as a Docker container. And what that does is it allows me to proxy anything on my home network. So it doesn't have to be running on the Synology.

• 28:08Wes Bos?

  So I run other stuff that has local servers. Like I have six or seven instances of WLED that control the Christmas lights on my house and the mirror gym, all of that stuff. And I often want to be able to access the Christmas lights when I'm away, especially because if I go to the end of my driveway, I lose Wi-Fi. So I need to be able to access it through the LTE on my phone.

• 28:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Wes Bos?

  Cloudflare tunnels, you simply just go into the Cloudflare GUI and you say, "All right, point this subdomain to this IP address and port." And it might just be localhost, which means it's running on the same machine as Cloudflare that's running on my NAS, or it's going to be another IP address that exists on your home network. Another one is 3D printer. I have a, what is it? Flashforge printer with a camera on it, and I'm running like a third-party firmware on it, so I'm not using their cloud service.

• 29:09Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, interesting.

• 29:10Wes Bos?

  So if I want to be able to monitor the print when I'm away, I simply just expose that out via my Cloudflare tunnel.

• 29:19Scott Tolinski?

  So, did you say you have it installed on your router?

• 29:23Wes Bos?

  No, I have it installed as a Docker image on my NAS.

• 29:27Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, sorry.

• 29:28Wes Bos?

  And basically, because my NAS has access to the home network, it can then proxy outside internet traffic to anywhere on my home network.

• 29:38Scott Tolinski?

  You know what, I have it running on my Mac Mini and my NAS, and it's probably not required.

• 29:44Wes Bos?

  Probably not. The thing is, with running it on each machine, is that you don't need to make sure that your applications are exposed to your home network. So if you're running like a VEED app, you need to explicitly use the --

• 29:58Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:58Wes Bos?

  -- host flag, and then that will give you an IP address and a port, and then you can then forward that. So I do run, I run CloudFlared on my Mac, like my laptop here.

• 30:08Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, you do.

• 30:10Wes Bos?

  And I use that just so I can turn my local on and off, because every now and then I'll want to expose something, and I'll just write, I'll just type "CloudFlared tunnel, localhost, whatever the port is", and then it goes to local.wesbos.com, and then that's exposed to the greater world. But then, things like my Jellyfin, my WLED, all of my local apps that are running on my home server. Those are just constantly running with the Cloudflare daemon.

• 30:38Scott Tolinski?

  Interesting.

• 30:39Wes Bos?

  Now, access. So, most of these apps will have their own auth built in. You know, like Jellyfin will have username and password. Home Assistant will have username and password, but some of them don't. Like especially if you're just building an app and you're running it yourself and you don't have any auth in front of your application. How do you protect that from the wider internet? So for that, I use something called Cloudflare Access. And Cloudflare Access is essentially just, you just put it in front of your tunnel. You have to configure some rules around it depending on like, sometimes you want API endpoints to be hit without having auth. Like for example, Jellyfin.

• 31:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 31:19Wes Bos?

  If you want like a Jellyfin Android app to be able to access it, you can't sign in there, you know, you have to give like an API token or something. But you just, you can set it up, for me, I have it set up with, email me a token, text me a token, or sign in with GitHub. And then you whitelist your email address, your phone number, and your GitHub ID. And I say, if any of these are met, then allow the person to go through. And it works beautifully.

• 31:48Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that's so much nicer than exposing your port just Yolo to the internet. Yeah.

• 31:53Wes Bos?

  Yeah, and hoping somebody doesn't find it.

• 31:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Oh my god.

• 31:58Wes Bos?

  Tailscale is another one. People love Tailscale. I've never used it myself, but it seems to be another super great.

• 32:05Scott Tolinski?

  I use Tailscale. I used it for vibe coding for my phone. There's a terminal app that connects really well, but you have to have a Tailscale connection there. And it worked really well. I think I prefer the Cloudflare Tunnels approach rather than like being on that VPN of the Tailscale. And I don't know if you need to do that. I'm not enough of a pro at that. But like, I think you need to be on a VPN of the Tailscale to be able to connect. And that was kind of cool, running, you know, open code commands for my phone for a little bit. But then I decided to touch grass and stop doing that.

• 32:45Wes Bos?

  I also use, I've got, both at the cottage and at my house, I have Unifi like networking. So I can use something called teleport. They have an app called Wi-Fi Man. And you just turn on teleport and installs a little VPN config on your Mac. And then you can, you can access your whole home network at any time. So if for whatever reason, you needed to access something that is on your home network that you, you haven't yet forwarded, you can install that. So I used that once to access, to mount my Synology. Cause I just wanted to drag some files into it as if I were home. So I just turned on teleport and Tailskill will do that as well as, as far as I understand.

• 33:28Wes Bos?

  So that's kind of where we're at right now. I really want to build, I have that itch. Like I want to build a computer, you know? And I'm kind of curious about like, what should I do? I kind of, I think the Mac Mini is probably the move, just given how fast those things are. But there's not a lot of expandability, you know? So maybe I don't want to spend like thousands of dollars on a home server. So I'm curious down below.

• 33:54Scott Tolinski?

  You just connect it right to your Synology and you got the storage. You got the speed of the Mac Mini.

• 34:01Wes Bos?

  Yep.

• 34:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 34:03Wes Bos?

  But like, but what's the hard drive space on your, on your Mac Mini?

• 34:08Scott Tolinski?

  I don't know. I don't use it really.

• 34:10Wes Bos?

  You don't use it a ton? I'm curious if that would be the move. I certainly would want some sort of ARM chip running.

• 34:18Scott Tolinski?

  I've thought about doing the Mac Studio thing, cause then you could run local LLMs on there. But that gets very expensive for sure.

• 34:26Wes Bos?

  That's the other thing I'm thinking about is that should I also be getting something that has like a GPU in it? So I can run these LLMs locally? And then I realized like my LLM budget is like $8 a month.

• 34:41Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, right. Yeah, right.

• 34:42Wes Bos?

  And really not spending all that much. So it's not a big deal to ping the APIs. But let us know down in the comments, what you are, what you have, what you've built. Send us photos on Twitter or Blue Sky, cause I love seeing everyone. Everybody's rack. If you want to see it off a rack, I will send you a picture of mine. It is very dusty, with very haphazardly crimped ethernet cables.

• 35:04Scott Tolinski?

  This has got the dustiest rack on earth.

• 35:06Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's just brutal.