Was given this little wintel box by a friend fairly recently, but I haven’t yet even powered it on. I don’t have a power cable for it unfortunately but when I do, what do you think I should do with it? What would you do with it?

I think it could potentially be just a basic lightweight desktop for web browsing and such, maybe a little smart tv box or something like that to replace the Chromecast I’m ashamed to admit I use, maybe run some basic self hosted stuff like pihole or home assistant? Could probably be a little emulation machine for retro games but I doubt it would be capable of much more than that. But I’m not sure there’s too many ideas! I need suggestions people

  • non_burglar@lemmy.world
    2·
    15 hours ago
    • I’d add a WireGuard VPN configuration file and make both accessible outside the LAN but only on my devices

    I don’t understand this part. Wouldn’t this device be on your home network already, or am I misunderstanding your meaning?

    • utopiah@lemmy.ml
      2·
      14 hours ago

      Indeed but by doing so I can connect from the outside World too, e.g. if I’m at the dentist waiting for an appointment, I just connect to the VPN over my 5G connection, no login required.

      • non_burglar@lemmy.world
        1·
        14 hours ago

        You only need one VPN peering point inside your network. You do not need WG on other internal devices, just routing between intermediary subnet and LAN.

        Am I misunderstanding your scenario?

        • utopiah@lemmy.ml
          1·
          30 minutes ago

          I setup WireGuard only last week so maybe I’m the one who misunderstand something : on your LAN assuming you are NOT using your router (or switch, or a networking device) to be a peer of the VPN, don’t you need to add each machine as a peer to the VPN? Also doesn’t that leave the most granularity so that the (root) user of each machine can chose to be on/off and more, e.g. split tunneling?