At least on Linux you just include the bind address and port on the cmdline, e.g:

./filebrowser -a 127.0.0.1 -p 8008

EDIT: Just downloaded the Windows bin and seems to be exactly the same.

It would be remiss of me to not point out that up until somewhat recently they had a gaping wide security hole (for presumably years) that allowed any customer to send email as any other and fully pass their spf and dkim checks (due to shared keys and having no way of ensuring their users could only send mail from domains under their own account).

When this was disclosed they abused the reporter, kicked him off their service without giving him time to back up his mail, tried to discredit him, lied that their bad practices were commonplace throughout the industry (narrator: they weren't) before finally going around removing all traces of the discussion. I was lucky(?) enough to see the reddit side of it as it unfolded and I've never seen such pseduo-tech bullshit being thrown around and well as nasty attacks on the reporter.

So yeah, they're cheap but they also seem pretty poor technically (or at least were) and seem like horrible people. YMMV of course.

Nah, no idea what you're on about. Must be a young man's thing lol.

Lol, you're gonna have you work cutout if you're going around downvoting and saying that on every single comment that ever mentions a VPS.

Hosting your own MC server, no matter where, is a perfectly fine 'self-hosted' counterpoint to using a Microsoft Realms subscription. What ridiculous gatekeeping, lol.

I don't self host anything where it would impact me unduly if it went down while I was on holiday to the point where I'd have to break state and go fix stuff.

I don't want to have to leave my beer or beach and head off to fix things like an email server, restore a password manager db etc. so anything like that which is critical to the point where an outage would prob have me do so means I pay someone else.

Gaming server? VPN? File-sharing?

Normally fine but if you want to be more careful about what is being pushed to your server you can use something like diun to get notifications and run updates manually.

Personally I love dockcheck, which I think is by a guy on the sub. I tend to just run that every now and again and be done with it unless I am notified of a perssing update, although I do still have a couple of things I don't care too much about just auto update with watchtower.

What makes you think this is the case?

A DNS leak test showing Cloudflare could just be that is the upstream resolver in your AGH config, for example.

Provide your phone model and Android version, I've never heard of the DNS being unchangeable. Bonus punts if you can post a screenshot of your phones 'private dns' settings.

'Gaming routers' is pretty much just a branding thing.

Ultimately best performance will be a decent 'prosumer' router that can traffic shape (e.g. implement CAKE) in order to keep ping times down even when the link is under load and then good switching and wifi for the internal side of things (modern wifi standards, gigabit(+) ports).

opnsense would be fine for the former (as would OpenWRT on a pi4, say), and then you need to plug in some decent access points like tp-link eapxxx range or unifi, ruijie etc. That combo should outperform one of those gaming routers that look like an upside down robot spider thing. Well, it won't be worse and it'll be more fliexible at the very least.

Also remember that your dad's gaming device should be hardwired for best performance no matter what you end up going with.

Really this is more a /r/homenetworking thing, they'll have plenty of advice for you to, inc. hardware recs.

Not sure about Roku, that might be asking too much, but Retroarch is the daddy of emulation frontends and I've seen people run that on Android boxes with ROMs just read from a NAS via SMB. It's available on most platforms you can think of.

There's also dedicated gaming OSes (which will run on many generic S905ish AndroidTV boxes as well as PCs etc) which serve as prettier wrappers to that and other emus, my personal preference being Batocera if you whole-heartedly wanting those client systems to become 'retro gaming systems'.

KODI + IAGL would also be a workable soln on all platforms which have KODI, that can run the games directly from archive.org so negates need for the SMB share.

There's also lots of retrogaming-adjunct subs where this will be answered better than by us nerds here too.

I'd have the clients connect to the central server in a hub-and-spoke VPN topology using something like WireGuard say.

Use the central host as either a jumphost or configure your personal devices to also connect to it via VPN and have it handle routing so you can connect directly to the clients once you're connected to the central server.

Thid is a somewhat standard topology so no need to reinvent the wheel.