For context: I have 0 programming, coding, etc. related knowledge.

For some months I’ve been dedicating time into setting up a Homelab that hosts music, movies, maybe home security (Frigate, I suppose), minecraft servers (or maybe other games too) and maaaaybe local AIs (if I get a better system), in that order, from more to less important. Some of the caractheristics that I prioritize are: privacy first, Zero third-party exposure, disk data encryption, self-hosting, FOSS priority perspective, trying not to compromise in any way my home network-using devices through all the process. Since, as I said, I have 0 programing or even Linux experience, I’ve done all this process guided by a local ran AI (Qwen 3.6), YouTube videos and forums (not the perfect formula for a cybersecurity safe environment, I know).

In an old laptop (Acer Aspire ES15-… with AMD A6-6310 / 16GB RAM) I’ve installed Linux Debian Trixie 13 (GNOME) with Docker and CasaOS with Jellyfin (for movies, it worked), Navidrome (for music, also worked) and recently Netbird, this one to connect into the local network from outside my home net, which kinda worked, but not as I expected it to work.

And this is where I feel I’m stuck. My main absolute priority the whole time setting this all up was being able to stream music from my homelab in my phone from everywhere in the world as long as I had internet connection, but when I managed to achieve that connection after soooo many hours and even stream music from my phone only with mobile data, it needed like 1 minute to load 3 seconds of a song, so it’s not enough at all. After seeing this, I’ve reseted all netbird data so I can do a clean install.

I need help with the process of setting this (I believe it’s a VPN) up in a way that it is Self-hosted, secure and fast enough so I can make it all achieve my expectations. Any video, forum thread or personal recomendation that you can give me will be so much appreciated.

Summarizing it a little, this is what I was trying to achieve:

CasaOS Architecture: Netbird (FOSS WireGuard mesh) + (maybe) Caddy Reverse Proxy + (maybe) Internal PKI + (maybe) LUKS Encryption Security Model: Zero port forwarding, outbound-only private tunnels, device-by-device approval, end-to-end HTTPS, full data-at-rest encryption.

Let me know if I’m missing any important information and I will do my best to share it.

Thank you so so much in advance!!