I typical don't do these types of things with my node; in your proposed situation I would tell my friend to use Blockonomics Address Tracker (https://www.blockonomics.co/blockonomics#/addresswatcher) or Cointracker (https://www.cointracker.io/) to see the transaction history of their extended public key, vice using the command line commands in Bitcoin Core to look it up on my personal node. I also use https://bitnodes.io/ to track the status of my node, ensuring that it is still visible to the network via incoming connections and thus contributing. But, in general, unless there is a reason for me to not trust what I am seeing on these websites, I just use these other sites for analytic data about the network and my wallets because they have an easier user interface.