It looks interesting, but I don’t see how it is better than NextCloud, at least in my use case.

Honestly, you may be overthinking this. For a media server you want something with a fairly recent Intel processor, say a 6th gen or newer i5, i7 or i9, with at least 8 GB of RAM (More is better), and as much storage as you can reasonably afford. The only reason I say go with an Intel CPU is because QuickSync can make transcoding go quicker. The particular model of the PC doesn’t really matter. Anything with these specs will run Home Assistant quite easily as well as most other things you might want.

If you haven’t run across https://perfectmediaserver.com/ you may wish to check it out.

You would want to use a reverse proxy to point your domain name to the correct IP and port. Caddy would work quite well for this though, if you are publishing your services for just your local network you will want to either disable TLS function or tell caddy to use its local certificate. By default it tries to set up TLS using a Let’s Encypt certificate.

Also, best practice is to buy the domain that you want to use for your FQDN on your local network.

Sounds like you may want something like PiHole. You can set your local dns using either the web interface or by editing the config at: “/etc/pihole/custom.list”

Sorry for breaking this into two posts. My employer insists on my working when I’m on the clock for some obscure reason. :-)

My guess is that what happens when IPv6 packets hit your home network depends on how your ISP decided to hand out addresses. If they gave you a single IPv6 address for your account, the there is absolutely no change from how IPv4 works, it’s just using different symbols. As usual you’ll need to forward the correct port to your Jellyfin or reverse proxy.

If they’ve given you a range of IP6 addresses, I suspect there would be some sort of “drop all inbound” firewall at your gateway/router” that you would have to modify. Either way you will need to dig into your modem settings or call your ISP for “help”.

Like I said in the other comment, I haven’t played with v6 much, but I hope these posts help you some.

I’ve actually been looking into this some myself. There seems to be nothing in terms of documentation or walk throughs aimed at the average home based self-hoster.

I haven’t tried setting my home systems up with IPv6 yet, been working on other projects, but here is what I have figured out so far.

While they are not compatible with each other, IPv6 is essentially a 1 for 1 drop-in replacement for IPv4. The symbols are different, but they do the exact same thing in the exact same way with DNS still only providing the server’s “phone number” and the client saying which port it wants. Instead of an A record, you would use an AAAA record at the DNS provider to point to your server.

This is fine and straight forward if your running off a VPS, just point the DNS to your server’s IPv6 address. Where I’m lost at is what happens when IPv6 packets hits your home network.

Unanswered Questions:

• Are my home servers behind a NAT firewall or is the server’s address that I get from my gateway (IPv6) directly accessible from the internet.
• If I’m behind a NAT, how do I designate the port number in my reverse proxy config (Caddy Server in my case).
• If the server’s address is directly accessible via the internet without a firewall at the router, WTF is my ISP thinking!?

Makes it more difficult, certainly. But not impossible. Most browsers and OSs’ will let you choose what DNS servers to use. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a DoH server.

iOS might be more secure on that front, though. Haven’t really played with their parental controls.

Growing up, (in the days of dialup) my folks tried to keep me off the computer till they got home by requiring a password to boot from the hard drive. I bypassed it by using a boot disk floppy I built at school. Couldn’t figure out how to get into Windows but I could still play Doom and Duke Nukem. Didn’t really even know what I was doing at the time. Thinking back, they may not have know about BIOS boot passwords. If they had, then what I did to bypass their lock out wouldn’t have worked.

If kids truly want to be able to do something, and it is at all possible, they will find a way. Nothing is secure if you have physical access.

It’s probably overkill for what you are asking for but I use the Calander/Tasks functions in NextCloud. And yes, you can hook it into Home Assistant. NextCloud just uses calDAV in the background.

Digital ocean and Linode are both reliable. I think their lowest cost option is around $5 USD per month

Remote playback or remote control?

Off-hand it sounds like you want media to playback on the remote device, so either Jellyfin or Plex. Personally, I use Jellyfin, though Plex does have better apps.

iOS has most of it built in: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201304 Also PiHole can be configured to (halfway) block any website of your choosing: https://pi-hole.net/

I say “halfway” because DNS based blocks are fairly trivial to bypass by anyone with the inclination to do so.