Depends on what threat you’re protecting against IMHO.

If you’re trying to be anonymous, connecting to your home IP first is a dead giveaway to who you are. Both your home ISP and whichever ISP you’re connnected to will know.

Only easy way to maintain some anonymity right now would be to use Tailscale’s Mullvad integration……Tailscale to connect your servers, Mullvad for anonymize/country changing.

Other way might be to ONLY use Tailscale/Mullvad, and set up an alternative auth front door to your own network. Complicated and doesn’t work as nicely tho.

Director of acting intelligent

Heh true enough. And you can run into issues with package updates breaking something. But hopefully that breaks things for others too so there’s some shared misery there rather than just having to curse your past self for decisions you no longer remember? 🤣

DHCP can be set to specifically assign the same IP to specific devices, reserving them and ensuring that no other systems will use the same IP accidentally. So your servers will consistently get that same IP address assigned to them every time, no worry about the ip address changing unexpectedly.

Very old school; yes you can certainly do all of that and track all of that yourself. We all used to do it that way……But it’s 2026….just as you’d use a real editor rather than edlin, or password managers rather than text files, the new ways ARE better, easier and more consistent. Making sure dhcp works is one of the modern (honestly not that modern) basics that make sure your network is set up properly and isn’t hiding some misconfiguration gremlins that only work because of some static ip and route workaround you implemented years ago and worked “until now”.

Wrong. It’s 2026. You should be setting static dhcp entries and using dhcp to ensure static IPs, not avoiding dhcp. Using manually assigned static IPs just means you’ve built a fragile unique snowflake.

Code sloppering

How small are these devices? I think the other problem is that neither BTRFS nor zfs really are suitable for removable devices, and definitely not for ones smaller than probably 8Gb at the very least.

Unlike NTFS which is just a file system, both BTRFS and ZFS do volume management too, so it’s not just a single partition thing; they prefer to take over an entire volume and manage everything.

So while they’re the closest filesystem with NTFS-like transparent compression……they don’t match exactly.

I also hazard to guess if the devices you’re using are too small to accept a BTRFS formatted volume, no amount of compression is going to be enough to fit what you need.

If you just want to play with a bunch of small old devices……maybe play with LVM and small RAID arrays and configurations instead. You can the build a bigger volume out of a bunch of those disks together and then put a BTRFS or zfs volume on them. Can be fun to experiment and learn with anyway.

The equivalent would be either zfs or btrfs compression. Transparent to applications, you don’t have to do anything special other than enable it.