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Sometimes all it takes is a random comment from a fellow self-hoster to put me on another journey... Thanks for the tip on passkeys and Pocket ID! Love the Pocket ID guides on all popular services. This looks to make it much easier for family logins to all my services. I'm starting the migration now already from Pangolin and inward.

I love the seemingly never-ending journey of self hosting!

Pangolin is a reverse proxy, so it can forward a URL to any backend service on any port. But you're right in that you have to be signed in on the browser you access it on. Therefore an app won't directly work without prior login. You can create a 'shareable link' in Pangolin, which I use for the Immich app. This gives me header tokens that the Immich app can take in its advanced settings, and that's how that one works.

I've recently moved away from dedicated apps for mobile services and toward web-based access for most things (I use Music Assistant in browser). This isn't perfect for everything and everyone, but I realise now with your question that it's worked well for me transitioning to Pangolin (and at least Immich app works).

Not my expertise I'm afraid. Geoip blocking is straightforward with traefik (and Pangolin docs), Crowdsec is a little more complicated, and with the external firewall into the VPS, there isn't much more I can think to do.

It's likely more a factor of how secure Pangolin itself is at that stage.

If today's outage is anything to go by, you're better off not using Cloudflare!!

I have continued to use it for public websites so that, in my thinking, at least the Cloudflare network is scrutinising who is accessing my webpages in case of attacks etc.

Pangolin is a simpler cloud reverse proxy, whereas Cloudflare has more bells 'n whistles for quick-set security. You just need to harden your VPS that Pangolin runs on. You can activate Crowdsec etc on it as well.

I run mine on a Hetzner VPS which has a nice firewall feature in the control panel securing the VPS ports for SSH and Pangolin tunnel to my home IP. Then it's only ports 80 & 443 exposed. And I think from memory Pangolin doesn't play nicely with UFW (well, Traefik doesn't).

I only started using Cloudflare tunnels recently, but I'm now using the self hosted alternative Pangolin on a VPS for private services, and I keep the Cloudflare tunnel for public web hosting, i.e WordPress. This also allows easy restriction to the WordPress login page for other users via Google auth etc which is something very simple with CF.

Having split up my private/public services to seperate tunnels also means I don't stand the chance of taking the public services offline with my constant tinkering of Pangolin and the VPS it runs on.

I have pushed the CF tunnel for file transfers occasionally (which is against their terms), but it hits remarkable speeds for a 'free' service.

I had Nextcloud running for several years (VM is the best way IMO, I would avoid the Docker AIO). However I found Filebrowser and it rocks as a file share service. Filebrowser Quantum is a fork with more feature as the original no longer has a maintainer. The most I've had someone upload to it was 300GB.

I use Filebrowser Quantum if you are happy opening up a port for it. It supports 2fa. Also requires Docker which isn't too difficult.

I ran Blue Iris, but despite my love for it, my disdain at having to run it on Windows made me move away. You can run it still in a VM, but it's not ideal, and also not meeting your requirement of moving off Windows.

I would recommend Home Assistant with Music Assistant for music playback of local library files, and that gives you a web page controller. I see Home Assistant also integrates iSpy DVR. No experience of iSpy, but the Music Assistant integration is superb. I use it to stream all music at home for the family to Chromecasts etc and this way everyone just accesses the same web portal.

Home Assistant can be Docker or it's own OS.

Perhaps not the size you're after, but I have a HP Z1 G5, i9-9900, 5 SSD, 3 HDD, and that can idle as low as 45W and costs me £60/yr in electric. I managed to pick it up off eBay for only £260 (discounted from £350; if you keep an eye on certain things, sellers drop prices to rid of their gear).

I love it. I started with pFsense, then really liked Untangle for its ease of use, then went (back) to OPNsense and preferred that for the fact it could run Caddy internally as a reverse proxy and was fast, but I was a bit frustrated at wanting to do more with it and needing to research everything. I already had Unifi APs and decided that it just made sense to have a Ubiquiti router. I've found it stable, easy to use with good feature updates, and have also just paid for the annual Cybersecure add-on which is reporting loads.

I was being too simplistic in my other reply. I was referring to basic router based DNS and NextDNS as the upstream resolver.

I don't have an answer for hard coded DNS when it comes to NextDNS, which is essentially an upstream resolver with block lists functionality.

And to be honest, I misinterpreted OPs original question which was to take PiHole to the next level, whereas NextDNS is an alternative to.

I can run app based routing and blocking on my router, but whether that would restrict DNS for those services I don't know.

Thanks for the clarification, you've got me wanting to pursue more DNS control now!

I think they're forked form the same source, Bittorrent Sync, so function the same under the hood. I wasn't suggesting Resilio did something Syncthing didn't. I've just found Resilio easier to use for client devices. And that OP was concerned about losing files from syncing.

The only odd behaviour I've had with Resilio, is when hosted on Unraid, random files on the SMB share sometimes have database names on large folders with lots of files (RSH-78254 for example), but when synced to remote devices, the filenaming is then accurate. I've been meaning to spin up Syncthing to see if it does the same, but as Resilio has yet to lose me any files, I'm sticking with it.

Could be a Docker issue as well I guess.