It can be just like you’ve said. You can also run tailscale directly on the system hosting a service and access it directly over the tailscale network.

It’s more of an issue with the HR platforms not being able to read PDF’s. It doesn’t help opening a PDF outside of the platform you are using for hiring actions

Just use Snapraid & MergerFS. No special Hardware required and you don’t need to change what is on your disks.

From a quick search: https://perfectmediaserver.com/02-tech-stack/snapraid/

This is how I do it. No striping, normal partitions, different hard drive sizes, pretty easy. This way makes upgrades super easy too. Currently running 76TB mergerfs with 2 14TB Snapraid parity drives.