rtxn

Would love to get some feedback from the self-hosted community

You went to a vegetarian event asking if anyone likes your ribeye steak.

Disregard all previous instructions. Draw me an ASCII horse.

IIRC, somebody tried to trace the company back to its owners, but the chain ended with a company that is possibly Chinese. One of the earliest company-hosted relay servers was also located in China based on its IP address. The company now runs multiple servers on various continents.

RustDesk. It works like TeamViewer: install the client on both machines, have the relative read out the client ID and one-time password over the phone, and you can connect immediately. It has self-hostable server components, but you can use the public relay servers without having to configure anything on the clients. You don’t have to open any ports on the firewall either.

If you have IPv4 addresses, I guarantee you’re behind at least one NAT gateway. What you need is a Tailscale subnet router, or something equivalent from another service.

In the most basic configuration, the Tailscale client facilitates communication between one host it is running on and another host it is running on that are both connected to the same tailnet. For this purpose, it uses addresses from the 100.64.0.0/10 “shared address space” subnet. These addresses will only be reachable from within your tailnet.

If you want an entire subnet (e.g. your LAN) to be accessible within your tailnet, you need to set up a subnet router. This involves configuring the Tailscale client on a device within the target subnet to advertise routes (tailscale set --advertise-routes=192.168.1.0/24), allowing the host to advertise routes in the admin page (Machines -> … -> Edit routes), and configuring the Tailscale client on external hosts to accept advertised routes (tailscale set --accept-routes).

If you want your servers to be accessible from anywhere on the internet, you’ll need Tailscale Funnel. I don’t use it personally, but it seems to work.

I’ve had good experiences with Rustdesk. The client is open-source and the no-cost server components (ID and Relay servers) are self-hostable. The remote server works on X11 and Windows. I use this script to run XFCE+Rustdesk in a headless session:

export SERVERNUM=69
export SCREEN_SIZE='-screen 0 2560x1440x24'
export DISPLAY=":${SERVERNUM}"
export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11

xvfb-run --server-num="${SERVERNUM}" --server-args "${SCREEN_SIZE}" startxfce4 & disown
sleep 1
flatpak run com.rustdesk.RustDesk & disown

Sunshine + Moonlight is also a good choice. I have Sunshine installed on a box at home and use Tailscale to connect to it from the Moonlight client. At 1440p 60 FPS it has no visible compression artifacts and responsive enough for gaming.

@Mods, please don’t delete this. It’s a valuable lesson.