We have for years desired a self-hosted solution to unify our fragmented data collections in one centralized location. This was the major impetus behind wtfs, for example. Ideally, we wanted a system that was:

• self-hosted
• not overly complicated to install and configure
• easily accessible across our entire infrastructure
• able to share selected contents through a public link
• expandable simply by adding more storage devices

We happened upon our current solution quite by accident while reading 2600. In an article titled “5G Hotspots and Tinc”¹⁾, the author explains that after switching from traditional internet service to a T-Mobile hotspot, they lost access to their home Nextcloud server. They go on to describe how they were able to restore access thanks to tinc. Having never heard of either application before, this piqued our interest. A short burst of research convinced us that this was the solution we sought.

We began the deployment with tinc since we, like the 2600 author, had no control over port forwarding at the installation location. Unfortunately, tinc's configuration parameters had changed in the year and change since the article's publication.

As has been the trend with our recent server operation, we opted to install Nextcloud within Docker.