If you want remote access to your home services behind a cgnat, the best way is with a VPS. This gives you a static public IP that your services connect to, and that you can connect to when out and about.

If you don’t want the traffic decrypted on the VPS, then tunnel the VPN back to your homelab.
As the VPN already is encrypted, there is no point in re-encrypting it between the vps and homelab.

Rathole https://github.com/rapiz1/rathole is one of the easiest I have found for this.
Or you can do things with ssh tunnels.

For VPN, wireguard is very good

I would say the more regular expiration and renewal of an LE cert is better.
It’s an ongoing check instead of an annual check.

At the homelab scale, proxmox is great.
Create a VM, install docker and use docker compose for various services.
Create additional VMs when you feel the need. You might never feel the need, and that’s fine. Or you might want a VM per service for isolation purposes.
Have proxmox take regular snapshots of the VMs.
Every now and then, copy those backups onto an external USB harddrive.
Take snapshots before, during and after tinkering so you have checkpoints to restore to. Copy the latest snapshot onto an external USB drive once you are happy with the tinkering.

Create a private git repository (on GitHub or whatever), and use it to store your docker-compose files, related config files, and little readmes describing how to get that compose file to work.

Proxmox solves a lot of headaches. Docker solves a lot of headaches. Both are widely used, so plenty of examples and documentation about them.

That’s all you really need to do.
At some point, you will run into an issue or limitation. Then you have to solve for that problem, update your VMs, compose files, config files, readmes and git repo.
Until you hit those limitations, what’s the point in over engineering it? It’s just going to over complicate things. I’m guilty of this.

Automating any of the above will become apparent when tinkering stops being fun.

The best thing to do to learn all these services is to comb the documentation, read GitHub issues, browse the source a bit.

Bitwarden is cheap enough, and I trust them as a company enough that I have no interest in self hosting vaultwarden.

However, all these hoops you have had to jump through are excellent learning experiences that are a benefit to apply to more of your self hosted setup.

Reverse proxies are the backbone of hosting and services these days.
Learning how to inspect docker containers, source code, config files and documentation to find where critical files are stored is extremely useful.
Learning how to set up more useful/granular backups beyond a basic VM snapshot in proxmox can be applied to any install anywhere.

The most annoying thing about a lot of these is that tutorials are “minimal viable setup” sorta things.
Like “now you have it setup, make sure you tune it for production” and it just ends.
And finding other tutorials that talk about the next step, to get things production ready, often reference out dated versions, or have different core setups so doesn’t quite apply.

I understand your frustrations.

Nano is useful because it is everywhere.
There are better editors, but being familiar with nano and it’s shortcuts means you can edit files pretty much anywhere.
Same with knowing the basics of vim (like being able to edit, exit and save)

If your windows computer makes an outbound connection to a server that is actively exploiting this, then yes: you will suffer.

But having a windows computer that is chilling behind a network firewall that is only forwarding established ipv6 traffic (like 99.9999% of default routers/firewalls), then you are extremely extremely ultra unlucky to be hit by this (or, you are such a high value target that it’s likely government level exploits). Or, you are an idiot visiting dogdy websites or running dodgy software.

Once a device on a local network has been successfully exploited for the RCE to actually gain useful code execution, then yes: the rest of your network is likely compromised.
Classic security in layers. Isolatation/layering of risky devices (that’s why my homelab is on a different vlan than my home network).
And even if you don’t realise your windows desktop has been exploited (I really doubt that this is a clean exploit, you would probably notice a few BSOD before they figure out how to backdoor), it then has to actually exploit your servers.
Even if they turn your desktop into a botnet node, that will very quickly be cleaned out by windows defender.
And I doubt that any attacker will have time to actually turn this into a useful and widespread exploit, except in targeting high value targets (which none of us here are. Any nation state equivalent of the US DoD isn’t lurking on Lemmy).

It comes back to: why are you running windows as a server?

ETA:
The possibility that high value targets are exposing windows servers on IPv6 via public addresses is what makes this CVE so high.
Sensible people and sensible companies will be using Linux.
Sensible people and sensible companies will be very closely monitoring what’s going on with windows servers exposed by ipv6.
This isn’t an “ipv6 exploit”. This is a windows exploit. Of which there have been MANY!

If the router/gateway/network (IE not local) firewall is blocking forwarding unknown IPv6, then it’s a compromised server connected to via IPv6 that has the ability to leverage the exploit (IE your windows client connecting to a compromised server that is actively exploiting this IPv6 CVE).

It’s not like having IPv6 enabled on a windows machine automatically makes it instantly exploitable by anyone out there.
Routers/firewalls will only forward IPv6 for established connections, so your windows machine has to connect out.

Unless you are specifically forwarding to a windows machine, at which point you are intending that windows machine to be a server.

Essentially the same as some exploit in some service you are exposing via NAT port forwarding.
Maybe a few more avenues of exploit.

Like I said. Why would a self-hoster or homelabber use windows for a public facing service?!

How many people are running public facing windows servers in their homelab/self-hosted environment?

And just because “it’s worked so far” isn’t a great reason to ignore new technology.
IPv6 is useful for public facing services. You don’t need a single proxy that covers all your http/s services.
It’s also significantly better for P2P applications, as you no longer need to rely on NAT traversal bodges or insecure uPTP type protocols.

If you are unlucky enough to be on IPv4 CGNAT but have IPv6 available, then you are no longer sharing reputation with everyone else on the same public IPv4 address. Also, IPv6 means you can get public access instead of having to rely on some RPoVPN solution.

I thought T568B at each end was standard practice these days

The benefit of using config files is easy version management via git.
Makes it easy to rebuild from scratch and easy to rollback a change that breaks something

Other services will be reflected by active DNS records.

If the only DNS record points to a “Buy this domain” webpage, I think it’s fair to argue that is misuse.
Doubley so if it turns out many unrelated domains are owned by and point to the same webpage, and it’s just doing a js hostname thing to make it seem relevant to the current address

but I want to simply remind you that containers are the successor of VMs

Successor implies replacement. I think containers are another tool in the toolkit of servers/hosting, but not a replacement for VMs