here

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 second this. I use cospend on nextcloud with the moneybuster android app

Amazing! Congrats :)

For the dynamic ip address that you can get a free domain name from afraid or noip or maybe others and point your vpn to your domain name instead of direct ip address. Following that you can run cron job scripts to ensure the ip address that the domain points to is up to date

MediaMTX can sort a lot of this for you. Then its just a matter of accessing your feed on vlc.

VPN is the safer option of accessing your network

Personally, I use this as a camera proxy bit it can record. I use zoneminder otherwise

Yeah, i faced the same challenge. I understand why they do it like that (cameras potentially mixing socs)…

I think there are some make/ models on their project but its far and few. Ive flashed 1 camera so far but had to check the soc myself

I need to crack open my (cheap chinese) cameras and check them at some point. Ive noticed them pinging my pihole for secu100 for cloud services. At least theyre blocked for internet access!

Many selfhosted NVRs have been suggested. Personally ive tried:

iSpy

Frigate

Zoneminder

Shinobi

Ended up settling on zoneminder at this stage.

For cameras themselves i just want to point out the OpenIPC project - opensource firmware if youre technically inclined

Someone might suggest something more elegant but one solution is a trunk port, maybe on your router, maybe a downstream switch (assuming wireless Ap is downstream of all of those) and connect that to wireguard on your server?

I use syncthing for this. Keepass and photos sync instantly