You are a kindred spirit. I have: 2 pi NTP servers - one running a GPS hat + PPS wired up, one using a USB gps receiver. a "workhorse" pi - 2 wired ds18b20 temperature sensors, cron jobs, email generators, weather page generator, connectivity monitor. One pi running piubos + nextcloud. One pi running as a clock. One pi running as a wireless temperature receiver. a few floating pis running media center or retropie or other things... just swap in the right USB stick and run.
A vpn won’t help you with inbound, since any packets marked as destination port 123 are simply dropped. That time server is simply for my own purposes now and can’t contribute to the pools.
I just went to look at my crontab again. Some highlights (lowlights?):
- Turning lights on/off around the house, because I found cron to be a more reliable scheduling agent that the one built-into my Wave software when I first set it up.
- Testing network performance (ping times to various locations)
- Fetching a mail account and processing the messages for an automation I have setup for some things.
- Updating online weather services with data from my weather station.