Thanks for your service! I’ve been trying out Thunder and I’m generally happy with it so far.

+1

In Ghostbusters 2 they rigged up a Nintendo joystick to drive the statue of liberty through the streets of NYC. Does that count?

You might try ZeroTier. You’ll each need a tiny client app, but its super easy to install and setup, and extremely secure. Free to use with up to 25 devices.

This answer isn’t getting enough upvotes

Yeah, they provide a “Flow” section where you can setup firewall-like rules to control your flow of traffic. You can configure rules that say, allow ssh to a specific server, but only from a specified devices, while allowing ssh, https and smb to another server from any device, blocking all other TCP traffic. UDP is a little weirder to control, but there’s a decent tutorial with example configs.

I hear about TailScale a lot, and I know its super popular in the self-hosting & linux communities. I haven’t used it myself though, so can’t offer a comparison vs ZeroTier. I found ZeroTier refreshjngly easy to use and install on client devices, so haven’t had reason to look elsewhere yet.

Anyway, have fun with your endeavor!

I just finished building a cloud solution leveraging an AWS EFS (elastic file system), a secure ZeroTier mesh, and a simple EC2 instance (vm) running Samba (or just sshfs/scp/sftp if multi-user file locking isn’t needed). EFS does have some pretty big limitations like the fact users can’t be in more than 16 groups (because it behaves like an NFS mount), and it lacks xattr and ACL support. Still, if you can work around these shortcomings you can build a very secure, surprisingly speedy cloud filesystem. Largest expense is the EFS, but after 30 days infrequently accessed files automatically move to slower storage, which is way cheaper. ZeroTier is an important piece of the puzzle, making your security and encryption a breeze. This allows you to run SMB over the internet without actually exposing any services. Connections are only made through your ZT mesh, which is highly secure.

It provides a web interface for mail (and other useful services). You configure it to send outgoing messages through SMTP, qmail, Sendmail, Postfix, Dovecot, take your pick for the back-end.

Have you looked into self-hosting NextCloud or OwnCloud?

Barrier: https://github.com/debauchee/barrier

Edit: Input Leap looks like a promising KVM replacement for Barrier, thanks for sharing!

I run kubuntu on a 2012 Intel i5 MBP and it runs like a champ. everything works perfectly, including mic, speakers, webcam… even minor details like the hardware buttons to turn brightness and volume up/down worked straight out of the box with no fuss.

qBitTorrent

8hz-wan-ip

I used to make clocks with the platters and give them to friends and family. Michael’s used to sell inexpensive clock mechanisms that looked really cool against the platter background. I haven’t seen them lately, but I’m sure someone sells them online.

I can’t speak for your exact model, but I’m running kubuntu on my old 2012 MacBook Pro (with an upgraded SSD and maxed-out 16 GB RAM). My daily driver is a desktop, but I spend almost as much time on the laptop. It’s a wonderful experience for my use case, and all the hardware is supported “out of the box”.

Maybe try distro hopping a bit to see which experience is best for your usage. Have fun with it!

I’ll look at that, thanks! I put Bliss on one and I’m not really happy with it yet. Just trying to type my wifi password had the UI wigging out on me, had to use a usb kb just to type the pass. I’ll look into Ubuntu Unity tho, thanks!

That’s a shame. I have a few promising leads to look into; I’ll update this post with my findings and chosen winner once I pick one

Looks interesting, I’ll check it out!

Yeah, I’ll definitely burn a few ISOs to usb to live test. I’ll be sure to update my post with the chosen winner once I pick one.

Great idea; thanks!