#personalvault — Public Fediverse posts

Personal Vault #004 – Tunnelling

Work on Personal Vault had to pause for a while because I needed to work in a coal mine.
...wait. Wrong dream.
But tunnels were involved.
I wanted to host the new Personal Vault landing page directly from my shiny "new" server. Then I discovered my ISP uses CGNAT, meaning I couldn't simply expose it to the internet.
Their solution? "We can sell you a static IP..."
Tempting.
But relying on my ISP for remote access didn't feel right. So I dug a tunnel instead.
Using Cloudflare Tunnel (at least for now), I connected my little HP server to the internet without opening any ports on my router.
For someone who didn't even know this technology existed a few days ago, it was quite the adventure. But it worked.
Tonight, https://pv-hq.com is being served from my own server.
One more step towards Digital Independence.
#PersonalVault #DigitalIndependence #SelfHosting #Cloudflare #HomeLab

Personal Vault #003 — We Have a Front Door

Every house starts with foundations.
But sooner or later, someone has to build the front door.
This week Personal Vault got its first public home:
🌐 https://pv-hq.com
Right now it's intentionally simple.
No login.
No media library.
No clever features.
Just a place that will explain what Personal Vault is and where the project is heading.
The funny thing is...
I've probably spent more time building this landing page than installing Debian, Docker and Jellyfin combined.
Not because it's technically difficult. Because first impressions matter.
One day I want people to arrive there, click "Enter the Vault", and forget they're using half a dozen different pieces of software underneath.
The website is the first visible piece of that vision.
Everything else can evolve behind it.
And it is obviously SELF HOSTED.
#PersonalVault #SelfHosting #HomeLab #Docker #Debian #OpenSource

Personal Vault #002 — The Product

One thing I want to make clear early in this project:

I'm not building a Jellyfin server.

I'm building Personal Vault.

Today Jellyfin handles media playback.

Tomorrow it might be something else.

If that day comes, I want to replace one component—not rebuild the entire system.

That's why one of the first design principles I wrote was:

Personal Vault is the product. Everything else is infrastructure.

The library matters more than the player.

The data matters more than the software.

And every important decision goes into a Build Guide—not because I'll forget next week, but because in three years I want to rebuild the whole platform in a single afternoon.

One step at a time.

#PersonalVault #SelfHosting #HomeLab #Docker #Debian #DataIndepndece

**Personal Vault #000 – Why I'm Building This**

Our digital lives have grown enormously over the last decade.

We stream films and TV shows instead of buying DVDs. We store years of photos and videos in the cloud. Our important documents, backups and memories increasingly live on someone else's servers.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Most of these services are excellent.

But over time I've found myself relying on more and more of them.

One streaming service doesn't have the film I want, so I subscribe to another. My phone fills up, so I buy more cloud storage. My documents end up in a different place again. Before long, my digital life is scattered across multiple subscriptions, each with its own monthly fee and its own rules.

The thing that concerns me most isn't the cost.

It's dependence.

Cloud providers change prices. Storage allowances change. Products get discontinued. Features disappear. And when you "buy" a digital film, you usually don't own it in the traditional sense—you've bought a license that can disappear if agreements change (or George Lucas decides the colors looked better twenty years later). Personally, I think we should stop calling that a purchase and start calling it what it really is: a long-term rental.

That made me ask a simple question:

**What if my digital life lived on hardware that I own?**

What started as an idea for a simple media server has already grown into something much bigger.

**Personal Vault** is my attempt to build a single home for my movies, photos, videos, documents, software, books and anything else that's important to me and my family.

I'm not trying to replace every cloud service or convince anyone else to do the same.

I simply want my data to belong to me, not to any one provider.

This account is going to document that journey—the successes, the mistakes, and everything I learn along the way.

Let's see where it leads.

#PersonalVault #SelfHosting #Linux #Docker #OpenSource #HomeLab
#DigitalIndependence