firewalla VS paperless-ngx

firewalla is open source https://github.com/firewalla/firewalla

Just to follow up because I think I misread OP—they’re looking at Firewalla who publishes their source on github, and it looks a lot like your classic FOSS firewall running suricata and probably doing DNS-based filtering. I bet if you dig into their source you’ll find dnscryptproxy, unbound, or dnsmasq with filter sets.

Using the Firewalla VPN Client for a 3rd party connection is one way. What this means is that devices on your network can initiate connections through the VPN to external addresses, and those external addresses can respond and make use of the established connection (ex: your machine uses a browser to request the webpage https://help.firewalla.com through the vpn connection, and the server hosting the webpage receives the request and is able to respond, by sending the requested webpage)

search https://help.firewalla.com you will find more articles on this topic. And if not, the communitly likely have more https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/360001948014-Expanding-Firewalla-Docker-Third-Party-Apps-Scripts-

there are a few threads https://help.firewalla.com like this https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4411622449811-Omada-Controller-Docker

From my understanding zeek does the inspection (probably not https / tls ) and generates alerts (internally) which Firewallas software (https://github.com/firewalla/firewalla) picks up and analyses then throws out alerts / blocks as they see fit.

Technically yes, but also maybe no. Firewalla's software is open source. You can download and modify it on GitHub. If you really wanted to, you could fork it and strip out all of the firewalla-specific code (ie licensing, app integration, etc.) and replace it with your own code.

I steered a friend towards Paperless (and away from an LLM solution) as a way of searching/accessing GBs of architectural PDFs recently - so far, it’s apparently working well for them.

https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx

Paperless-ngx is a document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can find your physical documents easier. With features such as tags, full text search, multi-user permissions system, this is a dream for those who like to keep an organized folder of files and documents.

Since last year I’ve been configuring and maintaining my homelab setup and it is just amazing.

I’ve learned so much about containers, virtual machines and networking. Some of the self hosted applications like paperless-ngx [1] and immich [2] are much superior in terms of features than the proprietary cloud solutions.

With the addition of VPN services like tailscale [3] now I can access my homelab from anywhere in the world.

The only thing missing is to setup a low powered machine like NUC or any mini PC so I can offload the services I need 24/7 and save electricity costs.

If you can maintain it and have enough energy on weekends to perform routine maintenance and upgrades. I would 100% recommend setting up your own homelab.

[1] https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

This has been posted a few times already, but I cannot tell you how life changing Paperless NGX is for organizing PDFs. As someone who wrangles all of the insurance and bills for my house, this open source software is so damn good.

https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

I maintain Bash script to quickly set it up locally on Linux with Podman. Give it a spin if you want to kick the tires.

https://github.com/jdoss/ppngx

Personally, I use https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup to archive all my emails and then only keep them on the remote server for as long as I need to (basically until I read them and respond or download an attachment into https://docs.paperless-ngx.com )