I do agree with you, entirely. My point is, it was the easiest option. I guess self-hosting Headscale should eliminate that, if there’s nothing suspicious with the clients.

Also, I tried Netbird, and it was good, but a bit more complicated. I didn’t like it UX wise, but that could be me not having enough time to explore. I have it installed with my mum’s PC at her home. My infrastructure uses Tailscale now.

Also, there are other alternatives. I haven’t tried them yet. All I wanted to say, there are compromises everywhere, and dealing with the US is the compromise for now.

I’m located in Ukraine, so personally, I wish them what they want to push on me — this administration wants me and my family to die for the orange monkey to steal some more money for himself, betraying his own country; I guess that’s obvious for all of us.

But I just think for me personally that’s rather a vector of my movement rather than changing things momentarily. So, to me, Tailscale was a god send. As I struggled to get through this. Now I understand it a bit better. I’d love to setup WireGuard myself, I just lack some knowledge, and also time plus energy. I hope I’d do that this year. We’ll see. Thanks for enhancing my point, and happy new year.

Not much from me, but it wasn’t clear to me whether you were successful with WireGuard. I’m not, till today! So I can’t recommend Tailscale more! Others recommend things like Headscale, or others, I plan to migrate to them one day. But so far, Tailscale was really good for me.

Have you explored what it takes to self-host a notification server? I explored Zulip, and it looks similar, but I haven’t explored the notification server yet.

Oh, I watched a Korean dorama about that, the name is Death’s Game (2023). Wasn’t very good to my taste, but the idea is quite interesting.

Do you know of a better alternative? No irony here, I’m looking for something similar for family and company (50 to 100 people) setting. Was thinking of deploying Mattermost. For family, we settled on Matrix and it mostly works. We are at their default server, and I’m considering self-hosting it in the future. Yet, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to have Matrix deployed for a company. It lacks too many features, including search. Mattermost looked like the best option for me. I did try it locally a couple of months back, and mostly liked it.

However, I never liked them as a company. They have been giving me those ‘we’d give you the community this wonderful opportunity to develop the software for us, for free’ vibes. Now, it feels like my impression correct.

I use it on a Raspberry Pi 2B and Orange Pi Zero, both work wonderfully for the task, and it looks like Pi-Hole can work fine even on a router. Both of my SBCs are passively cooled, that’s why I decided to comment on the photo: you don’t need a computer this powerful to run it. As far as I remember, my very first Raspberry Pi (v. 1B or something like that) handled this task very well too. I temporarily retired that SBC in favour of Orange Pi Zero, so I cannot say for sure, but I think that computer had no issues with being fast enough for Pi-Hole. Really, give it a try if you didn’t, it’s ‘install once and forget’ type of software. Perhaps it should be updated periodically, but I don’t manage that. The only nuance with it, you need to have two computers, for the redundancy. Otherwise you’d be having downtimes when you need to turn off the SBC, or even reboot it.