Perhaps there was an easier lighter-weight way of doing this?

sshuttle does exactly that. It’s basically a VPN that uses SSH tunnelling. If you have a host in the same network as the target machine, and you can SSH into it, sshuttle can route all TCP traffic between you and the target (or a subnet) through the host without having to bind local ports manually.

sshuttle -r ssh_server <hosts/subnets...>

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Minio is about to get Redis’d.

I use self-hosted services in the following categories as much as possible…

That question could really use a “not applicable” option. I don’t operate any home automation solutions, so any answer from me would be invalid, and neutral answers because the item is not relevant will appear the same as neutral answers because I use both self-hosted and externally hosted solutions (e.g. Mullvad for privacy and Tailscale to get around CGNAT).

The minimum spec is whatever e-waste you can find that still powers on.

My home server has an i3-4160, 10 gigabytes of mis-matched RAM, a ten-year-old 240 GB SSD with 36000 hours on it, and three 1 TB hard drives in a RAID5 array each with ~25000 power-on hours. It runs Proxmox on the metal with a virtualized OPNsense, Nextcloud, and Jellyfin server (plus smaller services). Jank levels are high, but not fatal, and it was mostly free.