Theres so much to unpack...! But ill try and throw something in the mix.

I dont know if freenas/ truenas supports a lot of addons or whatever they call it but the moment you mentioned media and games my thought went to proxmox, though i suppose you might also be able to get away with a bunch of docker containers.

Soo.. proxmox (or any hypervisor) will allow you to run multiple segregated VMs and containers.

On one vm you can install freenas/ truenas (whichever the good one is atm, im a little out of touch) and allocate the bulk storage drives to it.

Another vm for Plex/jellyfin

Another for minecraft, factorio, tf2

Another for nextcloud/ webserver

Nextcloud provides webdav/ caldav for calendar and contact syncing so sorted there. It also has a collabora app i think for collaborative document working.

In terms of security, you want to follow nextclouds secure configuration guide as a start.

The best way is to use a vpn to access your home network. Maybe give the others access if you trust them but you may then need to do some vlanning and segregation to protect the rest of your home network from them.

If you must expose to the net (which you may do with the games servers) then again, the config guide has you covered, use crowdsec, use https, use random ports, use strong passwords and mfa.

Do regular backups. 3 copies, 2 separate storage mediums, 1 offsite (3-2-1 rule).

Idk about the 8tb drive.

The above isnt the be all end all. Let it be the start of a discussion and your research journey

I have a server exposed to the wan. some ideas:

• disable password auth for pubkey when you can
• don't use default ports
• open as few ports as possible
• be conservative with your firewall allows: this is your server and not a public service

have fun!

1. Yes.
2. Separate VMs in separate VLANs for private and shared storage. Makes things a bit less convenient for you, but worth it imo.
3. Somewhere between $1000-$2000 I imagine.
4. RAID is great for minimizing downtime but is never a replacement for a backup. The 3-2-1 rule mentioned below is a good thing to follow.
5. Never grant higher permissions than necessary, never open more ports than necessary. If your gaming server VMs have no need to communicate with your Nextcloud servers then setup deny rules in your router firewall to stop that traffic from being possible and so on.
6. Get a proper physical firewall device that allows you full control. I usually use opnsense or pfsense as the software OS.

Some security tips:

Firewall should block everything by default, and you start allowing incoming and outgoing connections when you need them or if something fails.

Disable passwords and root access in ssh daemon.

Use fail2ban or something similar to block bots failing to log-in.

Use random long passwords for everything (eg: like databases). And put then in a password manager. If you can remember the database password, it's not strong enough. If you can remember the admin password for a public web service, it's weak.

Don't repeat the passwords. Everything should have its own random long password.

.env files and files with secrets should be readable only by its service user. Chmod them to 400.

Monitor logs from time to time to see if something funny is happening.

6. If you are self hosting for privacy, I recommend staying away from Cloudflare, that is, not to use their proxying service or Cloudflare tunnel.

More information here - https://blog.aiquiral.me/bypass-cgnat

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.

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