Previously, I’d written about how I was trying to connect my home network and VPSs.
Turns out life is too short to worry about things like that.
At the end of 2025 I bought a Dell Precision T5820 to use as one big server and installed TrueNAS on it. Basically, the server is a replacement for mini-PCs, Mac Minis, and VPSs. Everything I want runs on the T5820. All my virtual machines and apps. Including backups. And backups of backups.
Everything is only accessible by connecting to my home vpn.
Frankly, this set up feels a lot less stressful to maintain.
TrueNAS has been a bit of a learning curve, so Google Gemini has come in quite helpful. I haven’t run into problems Gemini couldn’t solve without some finagling. Being able to access the Google search engine, Gemini excels at finding solutions to setup issues easily (at least the ones I ran into). Claude and Perplexity were definitely not up to the job.