Are you ready to be tech support for when the “weird box in the corner” stops working?

And there’s no mention of how far away these people live; the further away the less likely I setup something like this. I have no desire to try and fix a bootloader issue from 1,000 miles away just to waste several hours and have to ship them a new X.

I know this because I’ve done it, and I wouldn’t do it again. If someone doesn’t specifically ask for a home hosted solution (and have some sort of technical knowledge), I never offer a home hosted solution.

Wait, why not create them an account on your instance ?

I like to leave ssh over tor hidden service on remote boxes. It's pretty resilient and can serve as emergency access for when something happens to the VPN. Not a great primary access method because of the latency.

Speaking as someone who has recently taken on a far-remote (e.g. about 22 hour drive away) support for a MIL, the best thing you could do is set up a VPN.

1. It works both ways (typically) so you can easily remote in to their system when they're on the VPN for updates/troubleshooting
2. it minimizes the hardware "on-site" at their location
3. Depending on your VPN client, it can have an easy to use GUI, further lowering the barrier if your remote person is tech-inept

For me, I'm still on Plex with a very old lifetime account with my MIL using a dedicated user account - that access is over the Internet. The VPN is to provide access to Overseerr so that she can do things like request specific movies/TV shows without having to email/call.

It's not perfect - one day I woke up to 26 seasons of "Into the Country", but it works fairly well.

I sat down with her one day while visiting about a year or so ago and walked her through connecting to the VPN, then getting to the hosted site, then disconnecting from the VPN - basically running drills and making her take notes until she felt she could do it by herself.

I run my Jellyfin on a Synology NAS and it connects to Tailscale on boot. (Doesn’t require any of their cloud stuff to be active, either). Maybe a cheap/used NAS is your answer?

wg-quick creates a systemd service for each wireguard config you have. So if you set up a tunel called wg0, you should be able to run 'sudo systemctl enable wg-quick@wg0' This will make your tunnel connect on every boot. I have the same setup on my proxmox, so i can reach certain services of my homelab proxied through a root server (the other end of the wireguard tunnel)

You can do this easily with Tailscale or a similar wiregaurd vpn.

If you wanna mirror the movies: syncthing
Remote: Depends on if you want to install a jump station you VNC/RDP/Teamviewer in or directly access it.