Complete Tailscale Guide; Setup, Deployment, and Hardening

The Complete Tailscale Guide:
Setup, Deployment, and Hardening

If you've ever wrestled with port forwarding, dynamic DNS, or a clunky traditional VPN just to reach a device at home or a server at work, Tailscale is about to change your life. It creates a private mesh network (called a tailnet) across all your devices, wherever they are, with no open ports and no complex firewall rules. It just works.

This guide covers everything: creating and securing your account, installing Tailscale on Windows, Linux, virtual machines, and Docker containers, and hardening your tailnet so it's both maximally secure and actually pleasant to use.

Deploy Nextcloud on TrueNAS SCALE; Behind NPMplus SSL Proxy

 

Deploy Nextcloud on TrueNAS SCALE

Behind a NPMplus SSL Proxy

Nextcloud is consistently one of the most-installed apps on TrueNAS SCALE, but the official app catalog ships with a few defaults and quirks that can send a fresh install sideways; especially if you're putting it behind a reverse proxy like NPMplus. The good news is that once you know which boxes to tick (and which to leave alone), the whole stack comes up clean and stays up.

This guide walks through the exact sequence I used to deploy Nextcloud on TrueNAS SCALE Community Edition with NPMplus handling SSL and reverse proxying, with all the working settings with no detours, no "try this and see if it works" steps, and no recovery sections you'll only need if something breaks.

Project N.O.M.A.D.: Your Offline AI Survival Kit

 

Project N.O.M.A.D.: Your Offline AI Survival Kit (And How to Actually Get It Running)

If you've been following the homelab and self-hosted AI scene, you've probably heard of Project N.O.M.A.D. which is short for Networked Offline Machine for Autonomous Data. It's an impressive all-in-one offline-first AI platform built by Crosstalk Solutions, designed to give you a full AI assistant, knowledge base, and document processing engine that works even when the internet doesn't. Think Wikipedia mirrors, Stack Exchange snapshots, medical references, and a fully local LLM; all in a Docker stack you run on your own hardware.

This post covers what NOMAD is, how to install it, how to get it behind a reverse proxy with authentication, and (for those of you with AMD Ryzen mini PCs) how to unlock GPU acceleration so your AI assistant actually runs at a useful speed.

Offline AI LLM System (TrueNAS Hosted)

 

TrueNAS Hosted Offline LLM:
Dolphin, Ollama and AnythingLLM

Introduction

Running AI models on your TrueNAS server provides centralized access to powerful language models for your entire network. This guide walks through deploying Ollama with Dolphin models and AnythingLLM on TrueNAS, making AI assistance available to all your devices while maintaining complete data privacy.

By the end of this guide, you'll have:

• Ollama running as a Docker container on TrueNAS
• Dolphin models stored efficiently on your ZFS pool
• AnythingLLM accessible via web browser from any device on your network
• Persistent storage that survives container restarts
• Optional GPU passthrough for accelerated inference

Best Value NAS System: Turn-Key & Custom Built

Best Value Turn-Key NAS (Plug-and-Play):

QNAP TS-464

Why it's great: Best balance of performance, expandability, and value. *Hot-swap supported.

• Drives: 4x SATA 3.5"/2.5" bays (hot-swappable)

• CPU: Intel Celeron N5105 Quad-core

• RAM: 4GB DDR4 (upgradeable)

• Network: 2x 2.5GbE LAN

• Expansion: PCIe slot for 10GbE or NVMe cache card

Price: ~$1,100 *4 x 4TB HDD's