You could self host a web client

you’re almost certainly routing local network traffic over NetBird instead of using local routes

That’s precisely the functionality I want, though. Secure, encrypted, mutually identified traffic should be the only traffic in a zero trust network.

I’m simply trying to create an ingress point into this network for outside access.

Thanks for your response! I’m completely self-taught, so I’ll go ahead and acknowledge knowledge gaps on my end, but how would putting all the nodes in a network cause routing problems or ARP poisoning?

I recognize that what I’m trying to accomplish is a bit overkill for the average home network, and a lot of my reasoning behind my design is purely for learning. My reasoning for putting everything on a mesh network is 2-fold:

• Providing encrypted, secure, and mutually identified networking between all nodes
• Creating a centralized source of truth and control – NetBird runs its own DNS system behind the scenes, which allows all nodes to be addressed by name regardless of location, which interests me because it creates a single point of administration for ACLs, routing, etc. I’m also able to access any node I want across the mesh network as long as I’m connected to it.

I have successfully run this setup previously with the NetBird management console hosted in a VPS, however the issue I ran into was that if internet went down at home, I could no longer access my locally hosted services through the mesh network. I could still access them via IP, since I was on the same LAN, but that defeats my goal of centralized control, mDNS, and a central source of truth that I got via the mesh network.

I have also successfully ran this setup completely local, however I am unable to access it from outside my homelab. For my use case, I think having all components of the mesh network hosted within my homelab is the best design. However now I have to figure out the best way to allow external connections to my management interface. Thus my original question should I use a cloudflare tunnel to my management interface, set up a wireguard tunnel from an externally accessible VPS service pointed to my management interface, or something different?

Do you recommend any resources about this? I’d be interested in learning how to implement this.

While I normally agree on #2, it doesnt really apply to Tailscale. Tailscale isn’t completely free, they have a free tier to generate business but it’s limited to 3 users per tailnet. Also its cryptographically impossible for them to snoop on your traffic.

Can you make the domain somehow personalized to you so you can say its for an online resume to further your education and employability? If you happen to host other personal stuff that won’t cost you anything extra, just make sure you have a fancy looking CV at the root.

I just set up a security camera for my dad’s office: zoneminder running the webcam and tailscale for access anywhere.

Good point, I like the ability to choose between VMs and containers. If I had TrueNAS in one VM and Nextcloud in another, how would you link Nextcloud to TrueNAS? SMB share?

Would you use something other than TrueNAS, then?

From the brief research I just did, this does seem like a good direction to take. However I’m doing a lot of learning right now and I’m trying to stick with just one or two technologies at a time and adding in Kubernetes and Helm is a little beyond me right now.