I have always wanted to become self-sufficiant and in achieving that goal, i have explored a lot in the tech realm. The entire idea of self hosting your own services and managing them made me almost feel like a god. I didnt need to subscribe to any OTT platforms and drain my bank account in the process of watching Game of thrones. That aside i was able to further my knowledge in how services and networking actually worked. For the people who do self host content in you home, you must be aware of NAT, which prevents any outside traffic to enter you local network. When i first tried hosting a website on my old rusty dell laptop using a service called apache, i truly felt like a nerd!.
it wasnt that easy, i soon came to realise that i cant access this website outside my own internet using mobile data or etc due to NAT. It took me a another year to discover that i can use VPN to access my internet using a mesh netowrk which the VPN provides. this is the VPN i use till date and it just works. TAILSCALE a key to all of my locked doors, this proved to be a more useful tool than expected, it gave its own IP and ran on a lower layer of my laptop’s processes and didnt pose any kind of inturruptions or exhausted my laptop’s resources. I later recommended this to my friend who goes by the nickname mindhunter. we were college students back when we discovered, we recently graduated and wanted to create a space for linux users and had converted a computer to a linux server which everyone could use with the help of tailscale.
The prospect of hosting a server and making it productive was truly a step in a diriection that i couldnt fathom, i had so many questions at that time and was facinated by how tailscale worked hence i write this as a thank you for tailscale, for truly being a key to all of my locked doors. We still use this server known as SVU, it is a community of diverse people who have found linux, learned linux and suffered with it.
