I’m very new to home networking. I’m not new to computers (hardware or software) - but for whatever reason, anything network-related has always been an enigma to me.

That said - I just got a new (to me) server. It’s a beefy one (made a post about it in another community). And so I figured why not just start playing around with Proxmox, learning some new things and spinning up a bunch of random VMs and whatnot.

I figured the first step would be to set up something such that I can connect to my computers from anywhere - and I’ve already done so. For that, I used Tailscale. But my question, I suppose, is now that my computers are on the internet (as in, for real on the internet, through Tailscale) - are there security precautions I have to take now and things I need to be more concerned about? Do I have to set up my own special firewall to make sure I don’t get hacked or something? I am honestly pretty clueless in that whole domain. So… ELI5 what I have to do, security-wise. Any and all help is welcomed and appreciated.

Bonus question: beefy server is beefy (yes yes, lots of power consumption, I’ve already come to terms with it. About 200W idle and should run me ~$40/mo.). Dual 18-core E5-2699 v3s. 768GB of RAM. More SSD storage in both boot drives and storage drives than the average human would use in a thousand years (SAS, SATA, & NVMe). I asked this over on c/piracy - what should I do with it? I’ve put Proxmox on it, and as said above, plan on learning things about VM hosting and different operating systems and whatnot. I’m also planning on hosting my own Jellyfin server. But… what else? Does anyone have any good ideas for any (non-GPU-intensive) things I can do with the server? Anything and everything welcome, lol - I wanna have fun with this thing!

TIA for the responses :)

  • tvcvt
    1·
    1 year ago

    Right now I don’t think you need to do anything special. Unless you did something out of the ordinary, Tailscale didn’t put your computers directly on the internet. What it did was create what’s called an overlay network that allows devices connected to that network to talk to each other. It’s private and encrypted and random folks on the internet can’t get on it by default.

    Do learn some networking (there are tons of great YouTube channels, books, and podcast that can help), but right now you can afford to do that slowly and not try to rush to complicate your setup before you understand it. There’s so much material out there, but I found this particularly useful to get an overview when I was first learning: https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-309.pdf.