Honestly I do love tailscale, but every time when I start using it I am just like… meh. I don’t need a bunch of interconnected as I have 1 homelab, and for other stuff like my backup system it goes over v6 so there is no NAT to speak off(just a firewall). And for any remote devices I just use plain wireguard including my always on VPN on my devices.

However I will continue to recommend Tailscale to people who are new to selfhosting and don’t want to deal with all the networking bullshit, and hey if you want to not be reliant on the tailscale control server host headscale.

I also recently installed it on Tizen(Samsung’s OS) and using the docker container(https://github.com/babagreensheep/jellyfin-tizen-docker) it was stupidly easy and the hardest part was enabling developer mode.

I just use my domain inside my network which is a .net

So the only thing I will say is that the problem with a “DocuSign” alternative is that docusign is more accepted within the proffesional community and when docusign says something was signed it’s trusted. In this case what is to say you don’t modify the data or something similar, I know you could send out a confirmation e-mail or whatever but you get my point.

But ofcourse I will always take more apps that can be selfhosted :D

Well… answer is I didn’t know NTFY had a built in SMTP server. I just used this combo cuz before I used it to send my notifications to discord which mailrise makes easy. I will say that mailrise does let you more granulary define what e-mails will be sent to what topic while NTFY just uses the recieving address as the topic which might not be wanted.(I can for example define stetsed@* which means it doesn’t matter if I use one of my other domains, or father@* which means he could use whatever domain he would want).

So it depends what you want to do, if it’s just playback(as in you get your media via another device) any device will do just fine like a Pi4 with an external HDD(especially with them dropping in price after Pi5 announcement). However this will limit your expansion so the question becomes how much storage you think you will need. As the TV can nativley handle all those formats you don’t need to do any transcoding, however personally I would say get something with a little more buffer room for if you ever do wanna play from a device that can’t nativley display those things, or for if you ever want to expand your storage.

So I would recommend Qbittorent combined with gluetun and your VPN of choice, I personally use ProtonVPN for my Linux ISO stack simply because it still has a form of port forwarding(NAT-PMP) which I can combine with scripts to get it port forwarded. However besides that I used to use mullvad and it worked great and can highly recommend although it is a bit more on the expensive side(both mullvad and protonVPN are, mullvad being 5 euro per month, proton being 10 euros if you pay monthly 6 if you pay yearly, 5 if you pay for 2 years).

I use these because they have a reputation for being less shady than other VPN companies like NordVPN/Express/(Insert other VPN that sponsors every youtuber under the sun). But it will depend on what you want and what you are willing to spend.

I use protonvpn due to me getting it with my proton unlimited bundle, and on the plus side with some scripting I can use the proton NAT-PMP forwarding with my qbittorent to get port forwarding while… distributing and acquiring Linux isos.

I personally did use Mailrise and I might consider setting it up again soon(Currently onlything I really have notifications for are Movie/Series acquisition and when that happens which goes via discord, and Proxmox which just goes directly to my e-mail provider without any proxy. Yes it shouldn’t work cuz my provider should reject the mail, but it does so I am not gonna complain about it).

I do also have a sendgrid free plan so i could use that, but I don’t like to rely in such cases on other providers I don’t have much faith in and that it’s not encrypted. Ideally I would have it go via signal but currently the signal API that is available for Apprise(via an external app) doesn’t let you send it in a “note to self” fashion and you would need to send from an external number, and sadly I do not have the knowledge of Go to take a shot and try to fix it myself.

I might also look at setting up ntfy.sh again, the handy thing with ntfy.sh is it can be selfhosted with a workaround for push notifications, and what you can do is give each of your family members a specific topic to subscribe to for notifications, and then when mailrise detects that e-mail(let’s say father@example.com) it will send it to the topic that belongs to that user. Letting you be able to send password reset “e-mails” etc.