5 port unmanaged switch for $9.99

https://www.amazon.com/Tenda-Gigabit-Ethernet-Desktop-SG105/dp/B01K1JUE1E/ref=mp_s_a_1_15?

I only lost $100 last weekend. I realized recently that the NVMe that I thought was in my server was actually a 2.5” SSD. Not sure how I forgot about that…. Then I upped my Ram from 16 to 32 (maxed out) to allow room for additional VMs.

We have cameras covering the driveway, front yard, backyard, garage, family room downstairs and living room upstairs. The two inside cameras are angled to capture as much of the upper and lower living spaces as possible.

• driveway so we can see people coming and going such as food or friends… if we had any.
• front yard to cover anyone that may park in front of our house instead of driveway otherwise we wouldn’t know about them
• backyard to keep an eye on the kid playing and knowing when the neighbor kids jump the fence to grab their balls
• garage so my wife can yell at me when I’m doing something unsafe or a visual confirmation we closed the garage door (got an app for that but physically seeing it is more reassuring)
• living room/family room to keep tabs on the kid when we are elsewhere in the house as well as to get a quick glance when we aren’t home and get worst-case scenario thoughts in our head

Basically, I’d only question his motives if he wants to install a camera in the bedroom or bathroom.

I have multiple layers of ad blocking.

• Pihole for DNS
• Firefox w/uBlock Origin & SponsorBlock (YouTube) on every PC
• Brave browser on iPhones.
• SmartTubeNext (YouTube) on Chromecast
• All of my mobile devices are connected by VPN to utilize Pihole when I’m not home

I have a 2 bay NAS in RAID1 that houses all of our documents, family photos, etc. This is pushed to the cloud with up-to 30 day versioning of individual files.

RAID is for data redundancy. Cloud is for backup.

I used to use Ubuntu VMs on Proxmox host but I’ve switched to Debian a year or so ago.

Lookup pihole and unbound. You’ll get ad blocking along with your own dns resolver. There are several near-copy-paste tutorials out there.

My services all serve a purpose.

I host a portfolio website. It gets me exposure even though I’m not actively seeking other employment.

My wife runs her own travel agency so her website is also required.

Pihole is used daily to block ads on our network.

Wireguard is on our mobile devices (phones, laptops) so we always have a secure connection on untrusted wifi, ad blocking, access to our documents that live on our file server. I’m at MCO right now waiting for a flight with full confidence that my connection is secure.

Nginx proxy manager to route the website traffic.

Rclone is used to regularly backup the file server that holds our documents.

Minecraft server because happy toddler = happy life.

I used to selfhost bitwarden (vaultwarden) but changed to paying $10/yr to relieve myself of the added stress that it brought for security/backups.