Thanks for the tip! Tailscale was so easy to get into and is worth it like you said.

thank you so much for all the suggestions!

My biggest takeaway from all this is managed VPN solutions like Tailscale are cheap ($0), easy to set up, and lets me not expose ports to the outside world.

Mostly a convenience thing, since I only need it on-demand and I usually use SSH for things anyway. As this post suggests I’m obviously rethinking that now :)