pfSense is indeed fantastic. The best part about it is you can install it on pretty much anything, as long as you have a couple reasonably fast network interfaces and an okay-ish processor depending on the network load it will just work. Also has OpenVPN server baked in which is pretty cool

I love my Microtik hEX S. It takes a minute to get used to the menus, but I really like how everything is laid out and managing using winbox. For 70 bucks it has a hell of a lot of features.

Before that I used a Ubiquiti Edgerouter X which I liked pretty well but I was not a fan of the web interface, it felt very dated; I also had issues with certain firmware updates that made the device pretty unstable. Eventually it kind of just died so I replaced it with this. I think I paid $50 for the ER-X, definitely recommend spending a little more for the hEX S.

One thing the hEX S can not do (at least that I have found) that the ER-X can that I care about is running a MDNS repeater. I have a couple subnets including one for IoT devices so this is necessary, as a slightly jank solution I ended up spinning up an Ubuntu server VM with separate NICs on the subnets I wanted to repeat between and running this binary to do the deed: https://github.com/geekman/mdns-repeater - if anyone knows of a better solution plz let me know.

Very impressive. I gotta ask, how is this feasible cost-wise? Mostly as in licensing for vshpere. I know you can get pretty far in windows server with evaluation keys, butI run an ESXi server on eval mode cuz I’m cheap and have to reset the license every 90 days with some commands and reboot 😅

What is the scale of your network, like is this all just in your house?

I run one main hypervisor with a bunch of different Ubuntu server VMs that I spin up as I mess with different things. I’m old-school so I am not a fan of cloud computing or even docker. Services I host that I use the most are NAS (samba), plex, pi-hole, dokuwiki (huge documentation nerd), and zoneminder which is a great open-source security cam software.

All of my servers are named after characters from the Dragon Ball universe.

Don’t recommend doing an ‘obscured’ naming scheme, hate having to refer to a spreadsheet to know what server does what because I tend to spin up a lot of random stuff. Highly recommend using functional names that are easy for your brain to remember, like an acronym for whatever service or types of services it’s running.

+1 for KeePass/KeePassXC. Love that you just get a password database file and it’s up to you to secure it. I also sync through drive for easy access and use KeePassDX for Android which makes the transition between devices a breeze. Having fingerprint unlock for my passwords on my phone is pretty cash. On my desktop I set up KeePassXC to auto-type my credentials into almost everything I use so I can use a hotkey to log in. Works with any program that you can match a window title to (or URL for websites) which is basically everything. I even have mine set up to enter SSH credentials after I connect in windows terminal using “SSH user@server”.