Hey folks, thought I'd take a moment to introduce myself.
My name is Simon and I'm new to Linux (well, kinda) in particular Linux Mint..
Years ago, more than I care to think about I used to run a debian machine as an NS2 while running a FreeBSD machine for most of my other online stuff NS1 and hosting etc and a WinNT machine for the day to day GUI stuff...
I've recently gotten back in to Linux after forgetting more than I also care to think about. My plan is to turn a Linux Mint machine in to my own cloud server as I plan on travelling around the world on my motorbike starting next year and doing videos for YouTube, so all the video footage that doesn't make the YouTube video will be either uploaded (or a ssd posted to my friend who's going to have the machine on his network and hard wire uploaded by him). If you happen to like motorbikes and travelling around check out
www.youtube.com/GlobalWalkabout 
I worked out from a recent long distance bike trip I can accumulate almost a terrabyte of video in less than a month, so storage somewhere like Google Drive would become prohibitively expensive very, very quickly... so thus was born the idea of my own personal cloud.......
I must say that I'm really impressed with how clean, nice and relatively easy Mint is, how easy it is to install and basically 'get it right first time' unlike the old days with RedHat, Debian and FreeBSD... in fact I NEVER managed to get a decent GUI running on my FreeBSD machine back then, every time I started KDE it was rather nasty to use.. Cinnamon is soooo nice compared to back then.
Anyway, I'm hoping that there might be some super sharp folks here who might be able to assist me with getting my machine set up to run as a cloud server (my other option if this isn't possible is to just buy a FreeNAS specific machine because of it's ease of use being that it's been designed to be exactly what I'm after... but, I don't want to spend more money than I need.. (though this doesssssssssss look nice
https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/ ).
I bought a mini-PC specifically to set up for Linux Mint, but to date have had a few issues with being able to connect to it from a windows machine going through an external (non internal IP) connection, I can connect with SSH from an internal IP address with no problem (though I'm yet to work out how to set it up so that I can basically pull up Cinnamon on the other computer.. because I'd like to be able to set it up so that I can administer it from anywhere in the world.
Ok, big enough rant.. I'm sure I'll find some answers to some things when I end up trolling through the forum, but hey, if you've got any experience with any of the things above feel free to reply or drop me a PM.
Otherwise though, first class work from the developers of Mint.
(oh, in case you're wondering about my screen name, I used it yeeeeeeeeeeears ago when I was running all the aforementioned servers in my bedroom - never needed a heater in winter, anyway, yeah, so this nick has been around for decades and I'm resurrecting it).
