Worth a read if you haven’t: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

but hasnep covered it well. also emoji use, overly wordy and that graph/tree is a common style of llms.

Personal privacy is a right. If someone commits a crime and the equivalent of a warrant is issued that data becomes evidence and it becomes your job to discover what’s on the devices.

Jobs like these exist in that balance between privacy and justice. A judge or however your justice system works has said that the potential crimes that person has committed justifies waving that person’s right to privacy in the same way as searching a home.

Your job and scope is narrow and you should take that seriously but would you rather someone who doesn’t respect privacy (e.g. a department inside the police force) does this job?

For the tools, those are the industry standards. they’re just tools and yes they’ve been abused but they or tools like them are necessary to do that job.

looking at the install script it looks like casaOS is installed directly on the laptop. you can check by running

systemctl status casaos

in a terminal. if that’s not found try docker ps -a to list all docker containers including any not currently running.

I’ve never used Netbird or casaOS. I run debian and docker containers. I would recommend looking at wg-easy as a VPN. it also uses wireguard but for me it just works. you open 1 port on UDP and route it to wireguard, it’s a secure way to access your network and is quite hard to detect from the outside.

I’ve heard good things about caddy.

“data at rest/LUKS” is something you should consider if your personally worried about someone physically trying to get information off your computer/server. if the server is running or an attacker gets into your system remotely, it doesn’t matter. as a beginner, I would determine if the data your saving is worth the extra headache of encrypted media, especially if something goes wrong/an update breaks something or your configs/setup messes something up. if you do, keep a copy of your decryption keys on a NEW USB drive (flash drives go bad) or printed out in addition to saved on your workstation/laptop/password manager.

Personally for new systems I recommend Proxmox hypervisor instead of running directly on the laptop. having your debian OS/casa or whatever you use virtualized gives you the ability to take snapshots in time of your OS, makes backups easier and can help when you expand later (backup and restore on the new computer running proxmox). mine is: proxmox on bare metal old office PC

• | debian > docker w/ portainer (I plan to replace portainer w/ komono)
• | TrueNAS > S3 bucket application (garage)

if Casa becomes limiting as you learn and grow, I would recommend docker compose stacks w/ a web gui like komono.

one final note, although AI can be very useful for troubleshooting and getting some code to fix a problem (albiet logic/problem solving isn’t their strength) it’s awful for retaining knowledge and learning in the same way that using a calculator or other tool before fully understanding how to do addition/multiplication manually. I would strongly recommend taking some time to learn the basics without ai if your goal is to understand how everything works. resources to start with are using and reading “man + command”, command help flags, online courses and websites: https://linuxbasecamp.com/ https://explainshell.com/ - copy paste a command with all arguments and it tells you what it does. https://training.linuxfoundation.org/training/introduction-to-linux/

you could definitely run proxmox in a VPS but I was thinking more of debian in the cloud. Then exporting that computer from wherever you host it as a ova file then importing it into your local server: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migrate_to_Proxmox_VE#Automatic_Import_of_Full_VM

and on the ram issue, I’m running on over 10 year old workstation hardware ddr3. it doesn’t take much to run.

NAS with zfs storage does typically want a lot of ram (e.g. truenas) but still for a small home environment it works fine with a lot less than 64gb.

I run proxmox bare metal (debian-based hypervisor) and virtualize debian which has all my docker containers.

with virtualization you can take a snapshot and backup everything that way. super simple to roll back if you mess something up. the added bonus is you could probably take a snapshot of your VPS and migrate it to a local vm.

Ubuntu is something I played with about a decade ago and I never felt like I was “missing” something for debian, especially on servers.