At some point I did the maths on my subscriptions. Cloud storage here, photo
storage there, a password manager, a note-taking service with a monthly fee
for features I used twice. Individually each was the price of a coffee.
Collectively they were a mid-range gym membership, for the privilege of
keeping my own files on someone else’s computer.
So I did what any sensible person would do: I bought another computer.
The pitch to the household was straightforward. One small, quiet box. It
sits by the router. It holds our files, our photos, our passwords. Nobody
mines our data, nobody doubles the price after the first year, and if it
breaks, the person responsible for fixing it lives here and can be shouted
at directly.
What I did not mention to the household was that I had never administered a
server in my life, that everything I knew about Docker came from one blog
post, and that the phrase “reverse proxy” still sounded to me like a
fencing move.
The first weekend went suspiciously well. The operating system installed
cleanly. The first few containers came up. I could see my files in a web
browser served from my own hallway, which produced a feeling of power
entirely disproportionate to what I had actually achieved.
Then I tried to make any of it reachable from outside the house.