The Perfect Media Server – 2020 Edition | Hacker News Reader

The Perfect Media Server – 2020 Edition

blog.ktz.me

28 pointsalexktz4 comments

Very cool to see some thorough, but "beginner" friendly documentation. The [SelfHosted](https://selfhosted.show/) podcast is great, but it's hard to search back through.

A couple points I'd like to see more on:

1. WireGuard on a VPS seems like a great option for services you want to access externally from your network. If I'm on my network, I'd like to access the services using the same method as externally (e.g. going to nextcloud.example.com) without having all my requests go through the VPS. Any recommendations for doing that (I imagine some local DNS redirecting would be enough, but I'm not sure)?

2. If someone had the budget and space to do so, would running two separate boxes, one for data storage and one for services make sense (i.e. if you could get a 2.5 or 10 Gb connection between them, would their be enough of a perf impact to make it a bad idea)? I like the idea of separating the two (can keep just the data server on UPS, focus on stability with your data, make it less dangerous to play around with the service box, etc), but not sure if it's worth the headache.

Author here - great questions and I totally agree on the podcast back catalog not being easily searchable. This is an attempt to fix that in some small part.

1. I'll be taking a break for a few days as I'm totally cooked getting to this point with writing for a while, but the WireGuard pages will cover this eventually. To answer the question quickly though, a local DNS server would do the trick - opnsense has unbound built-in or there's something like PiHole or Adguard Home that could fill the gap too.

2. It depends! And there isn't a right or wrong answer for this. With virtualisation I've found that one big box to do everything has been really very stable indeed.

DNS doesn't really redirect, but DNS is the answer. What you're talking about is split horizon, this is most common when you have an authoritative server for say a corporation, but can be applied here as well.

That said, I have a local dns server that is pi hole, I've set aliases in that that are preferred over my domains dns which would be used outside my network.

That way you can have pi hole pint to 192.168.0.0/24 and Google domains or whomever point to your vps.

Great post and great webpage. I do not see myself as a total newbie and I find somethings I prefer to do differently than you (I agree with Chris and his BTRFS option).

But I still find this website and you SelfHosted show very interesting, and it helps me discover a whole bunch of new things. Thank you guys.

I can wait for new content on The Perfect Media Server as VPN and Backup strategy is something I was not able to find an option I can settle on.

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