Since you mentioned Mullvad, you should know that AirVpn still supports port forwarding and they're running their Halloween sale right now. However, if all you're looking to do is make your selfhosted web services available on the Internet with SSL, then Cloudflare Tunnels can do this for free.
I just had a failed upgrade from MariaDB 10.6 to 11.1 and it was only my backup that saved me. I have a service that runs mariadb-dump every day and tars the resulting .sql file with a dated name (keeping only the previous 10 backups), so I was able to just start fresh with an empty 11.1 db and restore from yesterday's dump.
Here's my backup setup:
# /etc/systemd/system/backupdb.service
[Unit]
Description=auto backup mariadb daily
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker exec db /config/backupdb
# /etc/systemd/system/backupdb.timer
# enable with 'systemctl enable --now backupdb.timer'
[Unit]
Description=Periodically runs the backupdb service
[Timer]
OnCalendar=Daily
Persistent=true
[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target
#!/bin/bash
# /pool/config/db/backupdb
# runs within the context of the container
# /pool/config/db/ is bind mounted into /config in the container
# backs up to /config/backup within container
# requires files /config/db_user and /config/db_pw to exist and be populated
mkdir -p /config/backup
cd /config/backup
BASENAME=db.backup.$(date "+%Y.%m.%d-%H.%M.%S")
/usr/bin/mariadb-dump -u $(cat /config/db_user) -p$(cat /config/db_pw) -x -A > $BASENAME.sql
/usr/bin/tar -czvf $BASENAME.tar.gz $BASENAME.sql
rm $BASENAME.sql
while (($(ls | wc -l) > 10))
do
rm $(ls -t | tail -1)
done
And this was how I restored with that setup.
cd /pool/config/mariadb/backup
tar xvf db.backup.2023.09.22-00.00.02.tar.gz
docker exec -it db bash
root@db:/# mariadb -u root -p < /config/backup/db.backup.2023.09.22-00.00.02.sql
astutesnoot
joined 1 year ago
PiHole is probably the easier option, but if you're cool like me and end up going the Bind route, then the option you are looking for is called Response Policy Zones (or RPZ).
https://www.isc.org/docs/BIND_RPZ.pdf