I have an old laptop lying around and I have been meaning to self host some stuff on it but never got around to it.
My biggest limitation is that I only have WIFI and I do not control the network. It’s basically your default residential WIFI network.
The only thing I actually need is self-hosted cloud. What can I utilize this laptop for?
I starter my home server with a laptop. I did nextcloud, paperless, jellyfin + *arr services, photoprism, and a few others.
Not having control over your network is the biggest hurdle because you kind of need a fixed IP to access it.
However, there are some services to broadcast your hostname to the local network (e.g. so you can log in with serveruser@myserver over SSH).
You may be able to use that to access your containers from the network, but just keep in mind that other users on the local network can also access your server.
Fixed IP doesn’t matter today with virtual/mesh network approaches like Wireguard/Tailscale.
They open an outbound connection, so the router treats it like any other connection. Once the tunnel is established, inbound comms can take place.
Using Tailscale’s Subnet Router enables access to local devices that can’t run a TS client, while the
Serve andFunnel options enable external access from devices that don’t have the TS client installed. Edit: Serve is for sharing to TS clients that aren’t part of your TS network.It’s really interesting to see these solutions today, when Hamachi was doing it 20 years ago. Glad to see it’s caught on, and being developed/extended.
Local only does not provide much value over what I have, unfortunately. I would probably just use KDEconnect for that.