Don’t cheap out on a NAS, I got an entry level Synology when I first started it was great for learning but was quite slow. I needed to sell that and buy a more powerful model to get one that could run Docker. I went for 716+ which I bought used off eBay and works well for me, the difference in speed is night and day. Ram can be upgraded onboard if required. Good luck 👍
I got a lifetime subscription to keepsolid VPN a few years ago £12 for up to 5 devices, figured if I got a year out of it then that’s my money back, still going great now for me. Occasionally they do these lifetime subscription options for bargain price on stacksocial which is where I got mine. Worth keeping an eye out. There are better featured ones out there but all I want is something to funnel my Torrents and indexers through and this works fine on 150mb broadband I have with no speed drop.
I have this same setup on Synology using docker and funnel all the searches through Jackett and Transmission downloads through a gluetun VPN container. Living in the UK it was a game charger on the ISP restrictions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbSfaKwyfXE
Man I completely forgot about IRC, used to use this so much in my teens. Good to know it’s still alive
I worked for a major isp in the late 90s supporting dialup, used to be queues of up to 4 hours to get through, it was heavily oversubscribed and people constantly getting busy tones when trying to connect, this wasn’t a problem that was going to be fixed anytime soon. Often you’d answer he phone and find people snoring who had fallen asleep waiting to get through, youd shout to wake them up then hang up. You also had to be creative with answrs when they did get through like giving them a code to put in front of their number when dialling in 'to bypass the queue ’ by the time they’d ring in again and get through your shift was over and they were irate with someone else.
The 220+ was the first model I had, I found this slow and didn’t natively support docker as part of the package manager. Docker compatibility should be a priority when buying if delving into some setups mentioned here it just makes everything so much more convenient. The 16 series model is expensive to buy new, I picked mine up used from eBay from someone who was upgrading to a newer model. You can Google Docker compatibility for Synology models and get a list of models that work with it and narrow your choices down to these.