Yes this is possible but the difficulty on how to implement it is largely depending on what router you have. Essentially you want to set up two vlans. One uses the VPN as a gateway to the internet the other vlan goes straight out.

If you use PFsense you can watch some Lawrence systems videos on YouTube and he can explain it way better then me. Odds are there is probably a YouTube video out there. Some AIs like chatgpt or perplexity can also be helpful as well.

Ok cool 😎

From the Ashai website - “Asahi Linux is a work in progress. Many hardware components are not yet supported!”

Just be warned a lot of people have bricked or nearly bricked their computers just trying to get Ashai installed on their Mac. Daily driver this is not but they are making great progress! It will get there eventually.

I mean technically it does. Isn’t this the Ashai Linux and isnt it very Alpha / Beta stage? As far as I’m aware this is not recommended for anything critical ( per the project maintainers) and unless OP loves tinkering he is most likely going to hit a lot of unique edge case scenarios that require a lot of time to unwind. If you have a very narrow use case this might work but is probably not worth the headache.

Docker as mentioned above is great especially if you’re going down the homelab rabbit hole. You’ll find it really useful to get familiar with for future projects.

Another alternative is to install DietPi. It’s an operating system for a raspberry pi. It has all these programs you mentioned with install scripts including docker and installing (and updating) is as easy as checking a box. Also has a pretty good community in case you run into an edge case.

eBay is your friend, Shield came out about 9 years ago so lots on the used market. Also the phoning home for the paranoid can also be handled. Since it’s been around for so long there’s not a lot left someone hasn’t already figured out. Maybe not the perfect answer but worth considering. As a media player it just works and it’s tried and true.

Have you looked into maybe getting a shield and changing out the launcher? It’s a great emulator and will play any video file thrown at it. Worth looking into if you can’t find any sbc alternative.

I have not tried shucking drives but I imagine they should work. Currently have 20tb Seagate ironwolf ST20000NT001. The script takes two seconds to run and needs to be redone everytime you update the Synology software which doesn’t seem to be overly frequent. Running the script or not you have the same full functionality. Script just removes the warnings.

Hi there, have the 1823xs+ works fine with non Synology drives. Have 8 20tb seagate drives, an Intel optane m.2 and wd sn850x 4tb. Also upgraded to 64gb of Kingston ram. No problems at all, thing is a beast.

Thanks for posting this! Really interesting idea! Don’t forget to give us the good stuff - the details on how to implement this :-)

Thanks for posting this! Really interesting idea! Don’t forget to give us the good stuff - the details on how to implement this :-)

Thanks for posting this! Really interesting idea! Don’t forget to give us the good stuff - the details on how to implement this :-)

Thanks for posting this! Really interesting idea! Don’t forget to give us the good stuff - the details on how to implement this :-)

Thanks for posting this! Really interesting idea! Don’t forget to give us the good stuff - the details on how to implement this :-)