I’m very new to home networking. I’m not new to computers (hardware or software) - but for whatever reason, anything network-related has always been an enigma to me.

That said - I just got a new (to me) server. It’s a beefy one (made a post about it in another community). And so I figured why not just start playing around with Proxmox, learning some new things and spinning up a bunch of random VMs and whatnot.

I figured the first step would be to set up something such that I can connect to my computers from anywhere - and I’ve already done so. For that, I used Tailscale. But my question, I suppose, is now that my computers are on the internet (as in, for real on the internet, through Tailscale) - are there security precautions I have to take now and things I need to be more concerned about? Do I have to set up my own special firewall to make sure I don’t get hacked or something? I am honestly pretty clueless in that whole domain. So… ELI5 what I have to do, security-wise. Any and all help is welcomed and appreciated.

Bonus question: beefy server is beefy (yes yes, lots of power consumption, I’ve already come to terms with it. About 200W idle and should run me ~$40/mo.). Dual 18-core E5-2699 v3s. 768GB of RAM. More SSD storage in both boot drives and storage drives than the average human would use in a thousand years (SAS, SATA, & NVMe). I asked this over on c/piracy - what should I do with it? I’ve put Proxmox on it, and as said above, plan on learning things about VM hosting and different operating systems and whatnot. I’m also planning on hosting my own Jellyfin server. But… what else? Does anyone have any good ideas for any (non-GPU-intensive) things I can do with the server? Anything and everything welcome, lol - I wanna have fun with this thing!

TIA for the responses :)

Alright, this may be a bit of a loaded question. But I figured it may provide good insight to both myself and to others. I just came into a pretty beefy server - dual Xeon E5 2699 v3’s (18 cores each), 768 gigs of RAM. Ten front drive bays, 6 of which have 7.68T NVMes and 4 of which have 15.36T SAS drives. I’m thinking the NVMe drives will go into a single RAID 5 or 6 (thoughts?), and the 15360s I plan to use for more sensitive stuff so I’m planning dual RAID 1’s there. Boot drives will be a hardware RAID 1 of dual 1920G SATA SSDs. So again… pretty beefy. I believe this server would cost me ~$100/month to run, although I may try something where I keep it off 6/7 days of the week and only turn it on if I need it otherwise, I’m not sure yet. Thoughts on that are welcome too.

All of that said. I’ve got the power & the storage for some pretty neat projects. But I’ve not delved into anything of this nature before. I’ve heard of Plex, I’ve heard of Jellyfin, but I don’t really know what it all means past that. And I think it would be pretty neat to be able to dump some streaming service subscriptions and make up for a bit of the coin I’d be dumping to power this thing (may also host a Minecraft server with it, lol).

I’m very familiar with Linux/console, so that’s not really an issue. I’m erring towards either Arch or Ubuntu (fight me, I like both).

Thoughts? Ideas? I figured this was a good community to post this in but can remove if it isn’t.