I’ve recently migrated away from iOS to GrapheneOS and I need a way to have a family shared calendar and reminders. I’m thinking NextCloud because I don’t really know of anything else.

I’ve been doing some research and I’m a bit overwhelmed since I have never self hosted before and I’m not too familiar with these technologies. I have an old HP ProDesk with an old i3, 4GB of RAM, and 120 GB SSD that I was hoping to use intermittently until I get a newer machine. I want to be able to expose the instance to the wider internet so we (my partner and I) can access it on the go, but I’m worried about messing it up. I was reading that I need a reverse proxy as bare minimum, but do I also need fail2ban, Anubis (or Go Away), and special UFW rules? I got as far as installing NextCloud with podman on Ubuntu Server 26.04.01 LTS and I can access it locally, but I’m not sure how to get move forward.

Ideally I would like to have a bash script that sets everything up with user data being handled by an external drive so I can easily reproduce it to a new machine later down the line and facilitate backups. I’m not married to Ubuntu and I am open to using something else.

I also want to run other self hosted open source services like Navidrome, Yamtrack, Standard Notes, etc. Any guidance would be appreciated.

  • ExperimentalGuy@programming.dev
    2·
    4 hours ago

    Because you don’t have a lot of experience with this type of stuff, I would not recommend exposing all your applications to the open web unless you also are willing to install and maintain some sort of security dashboard or traffic analyzer with alerts in case someone is trying to do something malicious to your services. You can always tunnel in with a VPN at the flip of a switch. This would only expose the VPN to the open web, which is a much smaller attack surface than all your services. You could also use something like Tailscale to keep all the devices connected but not exposed to the open web.

    I would recommend going this route as a beginner hobbyist just so you don’t have to be worried about the security of your server as much. Hope that helps!