Sounds like NFS is a way to go in your case. Longhorn adds for your setup unnecessary resource overhead and complexity.

I’m using step-ca. Its running on dedicated SBC. ACME certs created for each service renewing automatically daily. Honestly this setup wouldn’t be worth it if it wasn’t for daily cert rotation. I’m not using wildcard certs with own CA as it’s bad practice and defeats the purpose. There are bunch of different ACME renewal scripts/services. K8s cert manager handling kubernetes services automatically. Opensense has ACME cert plugin, nginx proxy manager is using external cert managed by script. I’m validating certs with DNS using TSIG. Step-ca have several integrations with different DNS services. I chose TSIG because it’s universal. There is pi-hole integration if you using that. Buying valid domain is not needed as long as you have internal DNS. You need to Install root Ca on every machine that will be connecting to services. If you have many VM’s configuration management is the way to go.

Luks full disk encryption and encrypted offsite backups. This protects from most common smash and grab scenario.

I had issues where system upgrades would loose encryption keys and full restore from backup was my only option. Nextcloud have issues with encryption, some features are not available if you enable it (don’t remember which ones now).

Generally speaking if someone has physical access to your system you’re screwed. There are many ways that physical access can be used to get access to your data including denying you access to your data.

Yeah I looked at tutorial. Port 81 is only for management (NPM admin gui). Then you have your traffic ports for proxy services. Those would be 80 and 443 normally. You would need to expose those ports to the Internet if you want to access NPM/proxy your service. Port 81 shouldn’t be exposed on your public interface make sure it isn’t or at least have firewall rule to allow only local network (ideally management network/vlan)

It’s not clear what’s the purpose of NPM in your case. Do you want to serve internal network or expose to Internet. If it’s the latter, you need to see what interface you exposed NPM port on (have to be your public network - VPS IP), your firewall needs to allow incoming connections on that port. Most likely you will be using port 443 and maybe 80 for redirect (checkbox in NPM always use TLS). Use IP address first to eliminate DNS issues. Once IP is valid test DNS with nslookup/dig to see if it resolves to your IP.

OpenSSL command needs to be executed from VPS to eliminate network issues and just validate certificate setup. The IP and port would depend on what port you exposed. 127.0.0.1 should work from that context. Once you see certificate you can execute openssl command from your local and use WireGuard tunnel IP to connect to service. This is for internal network.

Can you elaborate more on what is not working? What are you testing to conclude it’s not working?

From my understanding you’re running VPS server. You have tunnel setup to connect to the server. You’re trying to setup N.P.M. with let’s encrypt certs validating via DNS.

To continue troubleshooting you should eliminate all network paths and test from the VPS (ssh to the system). Once you have NPM setup you should be able to test certificate locally connecting to NPM exposed port.

Assuming you exposed port 443

openssl s_client -connect 127.0.0.1:443 -showcerts

If you can validate that NPM is serving endpoint with the correct certificate you can move on to troubleshooting your network path.

iOS is still in beta available through TestFlight.

Not what you’re asking but want to share what I’m using with great success. Audiobookshelf has podcasts feature and it’s all in one solution for managing downloads and playing on multiple devices with sync. It has search feature so it’s really easy to add podcasts.

https://www.audiobookshelf.org/

https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf

Have you tried clearing build cache? That docker compose has build init and web containers. Latest version docker compose have —no-cache option

https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/compose_build/

There is also prune command

https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/builder_prune/

If your goal is to improve security you would have to look into e2e encryption. This means network traffic needs to be encrypted both between client and proxy as well as between proxy and service. Your volumes should be also encrypted. You didn’t elaborate on your proxmox/network setup. I will assume that you have multiple proxmox hosts and external router perhaps with switch between them. Traffic this way flows between multiple devices. With security mindset you’re assuming network can’t be trusted. You need to apply layered approach and use sparation of physical devices, VLANs, ACLs, separate network interfaces for management and services for respective networks. Firewall rules on router, proxmox and VM.

Some solutions

• separate network for VM/CT. Instead of using network routable IP going to your router you can create new bridge on separate CIDR without specifying gateway. Add bridge to every VM that needs connectivity. Use new bridge IPs to communicate between VMs. Further you can configure proxmox to communicate between nodes in ring network P2P instead using switch/router. This requires at least 2 dedicated NICs on Proxmox host. This separates network but doesn’t encrypt.

Encryption:

• You could run another proxy on same VM as service just to encrypt traffic if service doesn’t support that. Then have your proxy connect to that proxy instead of service directly. This way unencrypted traffic doesn’t leave VM. Step up would be to use certificate validation. Step up from there would be to use internal certificate authority and issue certificates from there as well as validate using CA cert.
• Another alternative is to use overlay network between proxy and VM. There are bunch of different options. Hashicorp consul network could be interesting project. There are more advanced projects combining zero trust concepts like nebula.
• if you start building advanced overlay networks you may as well look at kubernetes as it streamlines deployment of both services and underlying infrastructure. You could deploy calico with wire guard network. Setup gets more complicated for a simple home lab.

All boils down to the question why you do self hosting? If it’s to learn new tech then go for it all the way. Experiment and fail often so you learn what works and what doesn’t. If you want to focus on reliability and simplicity don’t overcomplicate things. You will spend too much time troubleshooting and have your services unavailable. Many people run everything on single node just running docker with networks between services to separate internal services from proxy traffic. Simplicity trumps everything if you can’t configure complex networks securely.